


How Peculiar

by dingus6000 (loser_lover)



Series: How Peculiar You Are, Miss Vista [1]
Category: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs
Genre: F/M, Like, an older sister figure to the other kids, i literally cannot write anything other than /oc, i love millard, its millard x beatrice/oc romantically but jacob is bea's best friend and she eventually becomes, um, what can i say
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-09-21 07:26:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17039381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loser_lover/pseuds/dingus6000
Summary: Here we have a story about a boy who follows clues from his grandfather's old photographs, tales, and his grandfather's last words which lead him on an adventure that takes him to a large abandoned orphanage on Cairnholm, a Welsh island. But what happens when there's a mystery at home that follows him to Wales? Will his best friend be able to help or only further the mystery?





	1. Introduction

        "So, what do your names mean?" asked a skinny boy with messy black hair and questioning green eyes surrounded by thin, rectangular black frames.

        "Well," began the girl sitting across from him on his balcony, a half drunk box of wine between the two sixteen-year-olds. "Beatrice means 'she who brings happiness' in Latin and 'voyager' in Italian, Clementine means 'mild and merciful' in French  _and_ Latin, LeClair means literally 'the clear' or just 'clear' in French and Vista means 'sight' in Italian."

        "Wow." he said. "I doubt that my parents put that much thought into my name."

        "Yeah," she said. "I wonder why."


	2. Prologue

 

        I think Jacob had just come to accept that his life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen; and not just to me! The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split our lives into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my adopted grandfather, Abraham Portman. 

        Growing up, _nonno_ was the most fascinating person both Jacob and I knew. He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans in steamships and deserts on horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren’t English. It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a couple of kids who’d never left the US, one never even venturing beyond Florida, and we begged him to regale us with stories whenever either of us saw him. He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could be entrusted only to us. 

        When Jacob was six, he decided that his only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer, and I, his right-hand man and cartographer. Grandpa encouraged us by spending afternoons at our sides hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red push pins and telling us about the fantastic places we would discover one day. At home and at my place, we made our ambitions known by Jacob parading around with a paper cardboard tube held to his eye, shouting, “Land ho!” and “Prepare a landing party!” while I would stomp behind him, a canvas rucksack on my back, rolls of paper sticking out of the top and pencils tucked into my hair and behind my ear until our parents shooed us outside. I think Jacob’s parents were worried that Grandpa Portman would infect him with some incurable dreaminess from which he’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating him against more practical ambitions—so one day his mother sat us down and explained that we couldn’t become explorers because everything in the world had already been discovered. We’d been born in the wrong century, and we felt cheated. 

        Jacob felt cheated and angry but I, I only grew more determined. Surely not _everything_ could’ve been discovered just yet: I still had a chance. 

        But Jacob only felt more cheated when he realised that Grandpa Portman’s best stories couldn’t possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children’s home in Wales. When we would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them, he said. 

        “What kind of monsters?” we’d ask, wide-eyed and on the edges of our seats. It became sort of a routine. “Awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes,” he’d say. “And they walked like this!” And he’d shamble after us like an old-time movie monster until we ran away laughing. 

        Every time he described them he’d toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for their shadow; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside their mouths and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws. It wasn’t long before Jacob had trouble falling asleep, his hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of tires on wet pavement into laboured breathing just outside his window or shadows under the door into twisting gray-black tentacles. He was scared of the monsters, I was too, but thrilled to imagine our grandpa battling them and surviving to tell the tale. 

        More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children’s home. It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird—or so the story went. As we got older, though, Jacob began to have his doubts. 

        “What kind of bird?” he’d asked one afternoon at age seven, eyeing _nonno_ skeptically across the card table where he was letting us win at Monopoly. 

        “A big hawk who smoked a pipe,” he said. 

        “You must think I’m pretty dumb, Grandpa.” 

        I looked at him in shock as _nonno_ thumbed through his dwindling stack of orange and blue money. “I would never think that about you, Yakob.” We knew he’d offended him because the Polish accent he could never quite shake had come out of hiding, so that ‘would’ became ‘vood’ and ‘think’ became ‘sink’. Obviously feeling guilty, Jacob decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

        “But why did the monsters want to hurt you?” he asked. 

        “Because we weren’t like other people. We were _peculiar_.” 

        “Peculiar?” I asked. “My mummies call me that sometimes . . . Peculiar how?” 

        “Oh in all sorts of ways,” he smiled, eyes twinkling as he looked at me like he knew something I didn’t. “There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.” 

        It seemed Jacob was having a hard time telling if Grandpa Portman was being serious. But my _nonno_ was not known as a teller of jokes and he frowned, reading the doubt on his grandson’s face. 

        “Fine, you don’t have to take my word for it,” he said. “I’ve got pictures!” He pushed back his lawn chair and went into the house, leaving us alone to look at each other in confusion on the screened-in lanai. A minute later he came back holding an old cigar box. We leaned in to look as he drew out four wrinkled and yellowing snapshots. 

        The first was a blurry picture of what I’m sure looked like to Jacob, a suit of clothes with no person in them. Either that or the person didn’t have a head. And Jacob said as much but I was confused. I could see the boy quite clearly, or as clearly as the grainy old photo would allow. 

        “Sure he’s got a head!” Grandpa Portman said, grinning. “Only you can’t see it.” 

        I frowned at this, wondering if they were playing a prank on me. 

        “I don’t understand,” I said. “I can see him right there.” 

        I pointed at the photo, my tiny fingertip pressing against his sepia-toned cheek, and Abe gave me a funny look. 

        “Can you describe him to me, _ziesele_? Be as specific as you can.” 

        “Um, okay. He’s got brown curly hair down to his shoulders and he’s got a lot of freckles on his cheeks and he looks really sad. Why isn’t he smiling for the camera?” 

        Grandpa Portman raised his eyebrows and he smiled widely, “He isn’t smiling, _motek_ , because he thinks no one can see him.” And I frowned again, wondering why he thought no one could see him if he wasn’t even hiding. 

        “I don’t get it, Bea,” Jacob said, sounding frustrated. “How come you can see him but I can’t? Can you see him too, Grandpa?” All my _nonno_ could do was chuckle. 

        “No, _tygrysku_ , I can’t see him, but Bayatriche can and that makes her special. That makes her _peculiar_.” Jacob’s eyes widened and he looked at me in awe. 

        “That’s so cool!” he said before begging Grandpa Portman to tell us more. 

        “Alright, alright!” he chuckled. “Millard, his name was. Funny kid. Sometimes he’d say ‘Hey, Abe, I know what you did today’, and he’d tell you where you’d been, what you had to eat, if you picked your nose when you thought nobody was looking. Sometimes he’d follow you, quiet as a mouse, with no clothes on so you couldn’t see him—just watching!” He shook his head. “Of all things, eh?” 

        He slipped us another photo. Once we’d had a moment to look at it, he said, “So, what do you see?” 

        “A little girl?” Jacob asked. 

        “And?” 

        “She’s wearing a crown.” 

        He tapped the bottom of the picture. “What about her feet?” 

        Jacob held the snapshot closer to the both of us. The girl’s feet weren’t touching the ground. But she wasn’t jumping—she seemed to be floating in the air. Our jaws fell open. 

        “She’s flying!” I cried. 

        “Close,” grandpa said. “She’s levitating. Only, she couldn’t control herself too well, so sometimes we had to tie a rope around her to keep her from floating away!” 

        Our eyes were drawn to her haunting, doll-like face when Jacob asked “Is it real?” 

        “Of course it is,” he said gruffly, taking the picture and placing another in my hands, this one of a scrawny boy lifting a boulder. “Victor and his sister weren’t so smart,” I frowned a little. “But boy were they strong!” 

        “He doesn’t look strong,” Jacob said, studying the boy’s scrawny arms. 

        “Trust me, he was. I tried to arm-wrestle him once and he just about tore my arm off!” 

        But the strangest photo was the last one. It was the back of somebody’s head with a face painted on it. 

        “But it’s fake,” Jacob said. “The face is just painted on.” 

        “Sure, the paint’s fake. It was for a circus show. But I’m telling you, he had two mouths. You don’t believe me?” 

        Jacob and I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then our grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie? 

        “We believe you,” I said. 

        And we really did believe him—for a few years, at least—though mostly because we wanted to, like other kids our age wanted to believe in Santa Claus. We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high, which for Jacob was the day in second grade when Robbie Jensen pantsed him at lunch in front of a table of girls and announced that he believed in fairies. It was his just desserts, he supposed, for repeating our grandfather’s stories at school but in those humiliating seconds I foresaw the moniker ‘fairy boy’ trailing him for years and, rightly or not, Jacob resented him for it. 

        Grandpa Portman picked us up from school that afternoon, as he often did when all of our parents were at work. We climbed into the back seat of his old Pontiac and Jacob declared that he didn’t believe in his fairy stories anymore. 

        “What fairy stories?” Abe asked, peering over his glasses at us through the rear view mirror. 

        “You know. The stories. About the kids and the monsters.” 

        He seemed confused. “Who said anything about fairies?” 

        Jacob told him that  a made-up story and a fairy tale were the same thing, and that fairy tales were for pants-wetting babies and that he knew his photos and stories were fakes. We expected him to get mad or put up a fight, but instead he just said, “Okay,” and threw the Pontiac into drive. With a stab of his foot on the acceleration we lurched away from the curb. And that was the end of it. . . For Jacob, anyways. 

        I really had no choice _but_ to believe him. Otherwise, I’d just be crazy, how else would I be able to explain the things I could see? First, I was able to see the picture of the supposedly invisible boy, then, as I looked, I realized I could see so much more. 

        Jacob just figured he’d eventually have to grow out of the fairy tales one day but _nonno_ had dropped the whole thing with him so quickly that Jacob told me he felt like he’d been lied to. He couldn’t understand why his grandfather had made up all that stuff, tricked him into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren’t. It wasn’t until a few years later when Jacob’s dad explained it to us: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story. 

        My _nonno_ was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one way ticket. He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped. But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognise them for what they are until it’s too late. 

        Like the monsters, the enchanted island story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children’s home that had taken in our grandfather must’ve seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn’t really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course. The peculiarity for which they’d been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn’t that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough. 

        Jacob had stopped asking our grandfather to tell him stories and I think he was secretly saddened, though Jacob thought he was relieved, relieved he didn’t have to relive the horrors he went through all for the sake of entertainment. 

        Sure, he had been through hell and back and had a right to his secrets, but Jacob had a right to his history. 

        I kept asking Grandpa about the children’s home and the monsters and his peculiarity so much so that I became a little island of peculiar knowledge in a vast sea of normal ignorance, all the while developing my powers. Of course, I couldn’t tell Jacob anything until Grandpa thought he was ready. I felt bad hiding all these secrets about our grandpa, about me, about even himself. 

        But I knew he would be ready just a few years later when I was seventeen and Jacob was sixteen. It all started when we were each a year younger, when an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only a Before and After.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nonno - Grandpa (Italian)  
> Ziesele - Little Sweetie (Yiddish)  
> Motek - Sweet One (Hebrew)  
> Tygrysku - Little Tiger (Polish)


	3. Chapter I

        Jacob and I had spent the last afternoon of Before constructing a 1/10,000-scale replica of the Empire State Building from boxes of adult diapers. It was a thing of beauty, really, spanning five feet at its base and towering above the cosmetics aisle, with jumbos for the foundation, lites for the observation deck, and meticulously stacked trial sizes for its iconic spire. It was almost perfect.

        Almost. Almost except for one crucial detail someone so kindly pointed out in an infamously nasally, monotonous voice.

        “You used Neverleak,” Shelley said, eyeing our craftsmanship with a skeptical frown. “The sale’s on Stay-Tite.” Shelley was the store manager, and her slumped shoulders and dour expression were as much a part of her uniform as the blue polo shirts all the employees were forced to wear.

        “I thought you said Neverleak,” said Jacob, because she had.

        “Stay-Tite,” she insisted, shaking her head regretfully, as if our tower were a crippled racehorse and she the bearer of the pearl-handled pistol. There was a brief but awkward silence in which she continued to shake her head and shift her eyes from Jacob to me to the tower and back to Jacob again. We stared blankly at her, as if completely failing to grasp what she was passive-aggressively implying.

        “Ohhhhhh,” Jacob said finally. “You mean you want me to do it over?”

        “It’s just that you used Neverleak,” she repeated.

        “No problem, I’ll get started right away. Bea, could you help me out?” I looked him in the eye, knowing _exactly_ what he meant. With the one of the toes of my worn out yellow vans and his regulation black sneakers, we each nudged a single box from the foundation. In an instant the whole magnificent structure was cascading down around us, sending a tidal wave of diapers crashing across the floor, boxes careening off the legs of startled customers, sliding as far as the the automatic door, which slid open, letting in a rush of sweltering August heat.

        Shelley’s face turned the colour of a ripe pomegranate. She should’ve fired Jacob on the spot and banned me from the store, but we knew we’d never be so lucky. Jacob had been trying to get fired from Smart Aid all summer, and it had proved next to impossible. He came in late, repeatedly and with the flimsiest of excuses; made shockingly incorrect change; even misshelved things on purpose, stocking lotions among laxatives and birth control with baby shampoo. Rarely had he worked so hard at anything and yet no matter how incompetent he pretended to be and how miserable I made her by just being there and helping Jacob in his shenanigans, Shelley stubbornly kept Jacob on the payroll.

        Let me clarify my previous statement: it was next to impossible for Jacob to get fired and me to get banned. Any other employee would’ve been out the door a dozen minor infractions ago. It was our first lesson in politics. There are three Smart Aids in Englewood, the small, somnolent beachtown where we live. There are twenty-seven in Sarasota county, and one hundred and fifteen in all of Florida, spreading across the state like some untreatable rash. The reason Jacob couldn’t get fired was that his uncles owned every single one of them. The reason he couldn’t quit was that working at Smart Aid as your first job had long been a hallowed family tradition. All his campaign of self-sabotage had earned him was an unwinnable feud with Shelley and the deep and abiding resentment of his coworkers—who, let’s face it, were going to resent him anyway, because no matter how many displays he’d knocked over or customers he’d short-changed, one day he was going to inherit a sizeable chunk of the company and, figuring Jacob and I would end up married one day, I would as well—and they were not.

        Wading through the diapers, Shelley poked her finger into Jacob’s chest and was about to say something when the PA interrupted her.

        “Jacob, Beatrice, you have a call on line two. Jacob and Beatrice, line two.”

        She glared at Jacob, then at me, as we backed away, leaving her pomegranate-faced amid the ruins of our tower.

✽✽✽

        The employee lounge was a dank, windowless room where we found the pharmacy assistant, Linda, nibbling a crustless sandwich in the vivid glow of the soda machine. She nodded at a phone screwed to the wall.

        “Line two’s for you. Whoever it is sounds freaked.”

        Jacob picked up the dangling receiver and let out a hesitant hello.

        “Yakob? Bayatriche? Is that you?”

        “Hi, Grandpa Portman.” Jacob said.

        “Hi, _Nonno_.” I chirped.

        “ _Moteks_ , thank God. I need my key. Where’s my key?” He sounded upset, out of breath.

        “What key?” Jacob asked.

        “Don’t play games,” he snapped. “You know what key.”

        “You probably just misplaced it.” said Jacob.

        “Your father put you up to this,” he said. “Just tell me. He doesn’t have to know.”

        “Nobody put me up to anything.” He tried to change the subject. “Did you take your pills this morning?”

        I frowned. One, Jacob’s dad swiped the key and both Jacob and I knew it. Two, it hurt to see Jacob think his grandfather, my _nonno_ , the great Abraham Portman, was going mad just because he thought his stories weren’t real and it hurt my heart that I couldn’t tell him the truth without Abe’s say so. I was also worried.

        I knew he had gone through a lot of issues, obviously including paranoia, and I had gotten calls like these before, but this sounded different, like he knew with a certainty that he was directly in the line of danger.

        “They’re coming for me, understand? I don’t know how they found me after all these years, but they did. What am I supposed to fight them with, the goddamned butter knife?” The way he said ‘they’ made my heart sink; ‘they’ so obviously referring to the monsters he had fought in the war all those years ago, and not the German kind. _The_ monsters.

        But Jacob was oblivious. He had heard him talk like this before, being the other recipient of these apocalyptic phone calls, but he just figured grandpa was just getting old and, frankly, was starting to lose it.

        The signs of his supposed mental decline had been subtle at first, like forgetting to buy groceries or calling Jacob’s mother by his aunt’s name. However, his ‘forgetfulness’ was understandable, in my eyes, anyway, because Abe was teaching me all he knew about peculiar history as well as training me in my peculiarity and self defense. At one point, I had even snuck him back the key but Jacob’s dad had swiped the damn key again right under his own father’s nose! Of course, Jacob was confused about all our ‘hang-out sessions’, as I so delicately put it, but he was grateful that I was keeping an eye on Grandpa Portman while he was at work and only had to worry about trying to get fired; so, he didn't question us.

        Unfortunately, what Jacob and his family had thought was his encroaching dementia had seemed to get worse over the past few weeks as his stories had seemed to come to life and made Grandpa Portman extremely agitated. Jacob’s parents, thinking he was becoming a danger even to himself, were seriously considering putting him in a home which I, of course, would try to prevent for as long as possible.

        As usual, Jacob tried to calm him down. “You’re safe. Everything’s fine. Me and Bea will bring over a video for all of us to watch later, how’s that sound?”

        “No, Yakob! You stay where you are!”

        “ _Nonno_ ,” I said in a calm, clear voice with a tone I hoped he would recognise as my understanding of the situation. “Jacob’s at work right now. Do you need me to come over?” Jacob looked at me a little funny but he quickly brushed it off.

        “Grandpa, the monsters aren’t coming for you. You killed them all in the war, remember?” Jacob peered over his shoulder before turning back to the wall, obviously trying to hide our end of this bizarre conversation from Linda who shot us a curious glance or two.

        “Hey, Lin,” I said in one of the most sickly sweet voices I could muster up. “Do you think we could have some privacy?”

        “But my lunch isn’t‒”

        “Please!” I asked, demanded rather, through clenched teeth and she grabbed the rest of the sandwich before shuffling out of the break room as quickly as possible.

        “Not all of them,” grandpa said. “No, no, no. I killed a lot, sure, but there are always more. Bayatriche, you stay away too! You’re not ready, just keep Yakob safe!” We could hear him banging around his house, opening drawers, slamming things. He seemed to be in full meltdown—and it scared me. “You stay away, hear me? I’ll be fine—cut out their tongues and stab them in the eyes, that’s all you gotta do! If I could just find that goddamned key!”

        The key in question opened a giant locker in Grandpa Portman’s garage. Inside was a stockpile of guns and knives sufficient to arm a small militia. He’d spent half of his life collecting them, travelling to out-of-state gun shows, going on long hunting trips, and dragging his reluctant family to rifle ranges on sunny Sundays so they could learn to shoot; he wanted to protect his family and have them be able to protect themselves in the case he wasn’t around, but they just passed it off as him being gun-crazy and Jacob’s dad even had a snapshot to prove it; consisting of Grandpa Portman napping with a pistol in hand.

        Jacob repeated the lie that he didn’t know where it was. There was more swearing and banging as Grandpa Portman stomped around looking for it.

        “Feh!” he said finally. “Let your father have the key if it’s so important to him. Let him have my dead body, too!”

        Jacob then got off the phone as politely as he could and immediately called his dad.

        “Grandpa’s flipping out,” he told him and I frowned to myself.

        “Has he taken his pills today?”

        “He won’t tell me. Doesn’t sound like it, though.”

        We heard Jacob’s dad sigh. “Can you stop by and make sure he’s okay? I can’t get off work right now.” Mr. Portman volunteered part-time at a local bird rescue, where he helped rehabilitate snowy egrets hit by cars and pelicans that had swallowed fish hooks. He was an amateur ornithologist and a wannabe nature writer as well—which are real jobs only if you happen to be married to a woman whose family owns a hundred and fifteen drug stores.

        Of course, Jacob’s was not the realest of jobs either, and it was easy to ditch whenever he felt like it. He said he would go.

        “Thanks, Jake. I promise we’ll get all this grandpa stuff sorted out soon, okay?”

 _All this grandpa stuff_. “You mean put him in a home,” I finally piped up. “Make him someone else’s problem?”

        “Oh, hi, Beatrice, I didn’t know you were there.” he sighed again. “Maryann and I haven’t decided yet.”

        “Of course you have.” Jake said.

        “Jacob.”

        “We can handle him, Dad. Really.”

        “Maybe now you can. But he’s only going to get worse.”

        “Fine, whatever.”

        Jacob hung up and called our friend Ricky for a ride. Not ten minutes later, we heard the unmistakable throaty honk of his ancient Crown Victoria in the parking lot. On the way he broke the bad news to Shelley: her tower of Stay-Tite would have to wait until tomorrow.

        “Family emergency,” Jacob explained.

        “Right,” she said.

        We emerged into the sticky-hot evening to find Ricky smoking on the hood of his battered car. Something about his mud-encrusted boots and the way he let smoke curl from his lips and how the sinking sun lit his green hair reminded me of a punk, redneck James Dean. He was all of those things, a bizarre cross-pollination of subcultures possible only in South Florida.

        He saw us and leapt off the hood. “You fired yet?” He shouted across the parking lot.

        “Shhhh!” Jacob hissed, grabbing my hand and dragging me as we ran towards him. “They don’t know my plan!”

        Ricky punched his shoulder in a manner meant to be encouraging but that looked like he nearly snapped Jacob’s rotator cuff. “Don’t worry, Special Ed. There’s always tomorrow.”

        Jacob and I were Special Ed 1 and 2 respectively and together we were the Special Eds because we were in a few gifted classes which were, technically speaking, part of our school’s special-education curriculum, a subtlety of nomenclature that Ricky found endlessly amusing. That was our friendship: equal parts irritation and cooperation. The cooperation part was an unofficial brains-for-brawn trade agreement we’d worked out in which Jacob and I helped Ricky not fail his classes and he helped Jacob not get pummeled by the roided-out sociopaths who prowled the halls of our school. I’m pretty strong, especially after training with Abe, but being as tall as I am and, well, a girl, I didn’t strike much fear in any hearts, so Ricky was better suited for the job. That he made Jacob’s parents deeply uncomfortable was merely a plus. He was, I suppose, our best friend—aside from each other, of course.

        Ricky kicked the Crown Vic’s passenger door, which was how you opened it, and I climbed in and crawled into the back and Jacob sat up front. Ricky shut the door and hopped into the driver’s seat and the engine rattled to life in a cloud of smoke.

        Just as we had pulled out of the parking lot and were en route to _nonno’s_ house, I zoned out, only snapping out of my trance when the ancient car ground to a halt in front of Grandpa Portman’s house.

        Ricky cut the engine, got out, and kicked the door open. Our shoes hushed through the dry grass to the porch.

        Jacob rang the bell and waited. A dog barked somewhere, a lonely sound in the muggy evening. When there was no answer he banged on the door, Ricky swatted at the gnats that had begun to clothe us.

        “Maybe he stepped out,” Ricky said, grinning. “Hot date.”

        “Go ahead and laugh,” Jacob said. “He’s got a better shot than me or you any night of the week.”

        “Hey!” Ricky said, mock offended. “What about Bea? She’s got the same chances as us!”

        “Dude, look at her,” Jacob said, directing Ricky’s line of vision to me. “She’s smart and pretty and nice and a ton of other things. Bea has better chances than you, me, and my grandpa combined!”

        I flushed a little, flattered, of course, a little embarrassed as well, but I just turned and stepped off the porch and fished the spare key from its hiding spot.

        I unlocked the door before turning to Ricky, my hand out to stop him, “Wait here.”

        “Like hell I am. Why?”

        “Because you’re six five and have green hair and Jacob’s grandpa doesn’t know you and owns lots of guns.”

        Ricky shrugged and stuck a wad of tobacco in his cheek. He went to stretch himself on a lawn chair as I stepped inside with Jacob at my heels.

        Even in the fading light we could tell the house was a disaster; it looked like it’d been ransacked by thieves. Bookshelves and cabinets had been emptied, the knickknacks and large-print Readers Digests that had filled them thrown across the floor. Couch cushions and chairs were overturned. The fridge and freezer doors hung open, their contents melting into sticky puddles on the linoleum.

        My heart sank but I felt my ears perk up and my eyesight sharpen, the adrenaline in my system making me feel superhuman. Jacob called grandpa’s name—but we heard nothing.

        We went from room to room, turning on lights and looking anywhere a paranoid old man might hide from monsters; behind furniture, in the attic crawlspace, under the workbench in the garage; honestly, I was really just following Jacob with my hand hovering over the front pocket of my jean shorts where a switchblade Abe had gifted me for my seventeenth birthday sat, ready to be deployed in a second should the need arise.

        The worst place we checked was the garage which was where grandpa’s weapons cabinet stood, looming over us, obviously still locked, the handle ringed with scratch marks where he futilely tried to pick it and I felt a stab of sorry run through me.

        Finally, out on the lanai, a gallows of unwatered ferns swung browning in the breeze and while Jacob was on his knees on the astroturfed floor peering beneath rattan benches, I saw a gleam of light from the back yard.

        I ran out of the screened-in porch to find a flashlight in the grass and I called for Jacob. I heard him hit his head on one of the benches, my eyes not leaving the torch, before he scrambled out into the yard and stopped next to me, panting.

        Jacob shouted for Ricky and a moment later he came tearing around the side of the house. Right when Ricky came to a screeching halt, I turned around to see a mean-looking slice in the screen door and I went to run my finger over the slit, catching both boys’ attention. He let out a low whistle, “That’s a helluva cut. Wild pig coulda done it. Or a bobcat maybe. You should see the claws on them things.”

        A peal of savage barking broke out nearby. The boys started then traded a nervous glance.

        “Or a dog,” Jacob said. But I knew it wasn’t a pig, or a bobcat, or a dog. I knew _exactly_ what it was.

        “Could be,” Ricky said, nodding. “I got a a .22 in my trunk. Y’all just wait.” And he walked off to retrieve it.

        Jacob watched him walk away, his back turned, before spinning around to face me—to see his best friend of over a decade standing there with the flashlight and a switchblade in hand—and he jumped.

        “What the hell, Bea?!” He cried, obviously startled.

        “Protection. Let’s go find Grandpa.” I said, walking up to the edge of the wood before stopping and looking over my shoulder. “You coming?” He scampered after me and we tramped through the underbrush like bloodhounds scenting an invisible trail.

        It’s hard to run in a Florida woods, where every square foot not occupied by trees is bristling with knee-high—thigh-high in my case—palmetto spears and nets of entangling skunk vine, but we did our best, calling Grandpa Portman’s name and sweeping the flashlight everywhere. Jacob caught a white glint out of the corner of his eye and made a beeline for it, freaking me out in the process, only for it to turn out to be a bleached and deflated soccer ball we’d lost years before.

        Jacob was about ready to give up, my faith starting to wane as well, when I caught sight of a narrow corridor of freshly stomped palmettos not far away. I beckoned for Jacob to follow me and I stepped onto the path and shone the light around, the light catching on leaves splattered with some dark liquid. Our throats went dry. Steeling ourselves, we began to follow the trail. The farther we went, the more our stomachs knotted, all my training couldn’t have prepared me for anything like this and that was when I saw him.

        My _nonno_ lay face down in a bed of creeper, his legs sprawled out and one arm twisted beneath him as if he’d fallen from a great height. We thought surely he was dead. His undershirt was soaked with blood, his pants were torn, and one shoe was missing. I dropped the flashlight and immediately ran to him but I couldn’t do anything but stand over him, watching, my hands shaking—Jacob wasn’t doing much better. For a long moment he just stared, the beam of the flashlight discarded on the ground, casting strange, scary shadows on the plants around us. When Jacob seemed to be able to breathe again, he said grandpa’s name, but he didn’t move.

        I walked over to his body and sank to my knees and Jacob shuffled next to me and kneeled very slowly. I pressed the tips of my index and middle fingers to his neck. The blood that was pooled around him and beneath my knees was still warm. I could feel a very faint heartbeat and him breathing ever so shallowly.

        I slid my arms under him and, with Jacob’s help, rolled him onto his back, placing his head on my knees so he didn’t have to be uncomfortable for much longer and tears welled up in my eyes at the thought. He was alive—though, just barely—his eyes glassy, his face sunken and white. Then we spotted the gashes across his midsection and it looked like Jacob was about to faint. They were wide and deep and clotted with soil, and the ground where he’d lain was muddy with blood. Jacob tried to pull the rags of his shirt over the wounds without looking at them.

        Then we heard Ricky shout from the backyard—I had almost forgotten about him. “WE’RE HERE!” Jacob screamed and we thought maybe he should’ve said something more like 'danger' or 'blood', but we knew we couldn’t form the words. All we could think was that grandfathers were supposed to die in beds, in hushed places places humming with machines, not in heaps on the sodden, reeking ground with ants marching over them, a brass letter opener clutched in one trembling hand.

        A letter opener. That was all he had to defend himself. Jacob slid it from his fingers and he grasped helplessly at the air, so he took his hand and held it. Jacob’s nail-bitten fingers twined with Abe’s, pale and webbed with purple veins.

        “We have to move you,” Jacob told him, sliding one arm under his back and I tried to tell Jacob it was no use but he didn’t stop trying until Grandpa Portman moaned and went rigid. He couldn’t bear to hurt him and neither could I. We couldn’t leave him out their either so there was nothing we could do but wait, so Jacob gently brushed dirt from his arms and face while I softly brushed away his thinning white hair as I hummed a Yiddish lullaby _nonno_ had used to sing to us. That’s when I noticed his lips moving and I gripped Jacob’s forearm.

        His voice was barely audible over the hum of a humid Florida night so we leaned down and put our ears near his lips. He was mumbling, fading in and out of lucidity, shifting between English and Polish.

        “I don’t understand,” Jacob whispered. He repeated his name until his eyes seemed to focus on us. He blinked and looked me in the eyes.

        “ _Nonno_ ,” I whimpered. “We’re not ready, I’m not ready. Don’t go.”

        “ _Cicho, motek. Dbaj o bezpieczeństwo Yakob. Pozwól mu znaleźć drogę na własną rękę. Powiedz mu, co wiesz, kiedy jesteś z ptakiem. Pamiętaj, czego cię nauczyłem. Jestem z was taki dumny. Tak bardzo was kocham._ ”

        “ _Nonno_ ,” I hiccupped. “ _My też cię kochamy. Będę go chronił. Obiecuję._ ” I placed a gentle kiss to his forehead and a tear dripped onto his cheek. “ _Kocham Cię dziadku. Dziękuję Ci za wszystko._ ”

        Jacob whispered his name and his eyes shifted to him. “Go to the island, Yakob. Take, Bayatriche. Here it’s not safe.” It was the old paranoia, or so Jacob thought. He squeezed his hand and assured him we were fine, he was going to be fine. That was twice in one day he’d lied to him.

        Jacob asked him what happened, what animal had hurt him, but he wasn’t listening and neither was Jacob. I wanted to yell at him, to be mad rather than feel this gut wrenching sorrow, but I couldn’t. He just didn’t know and that almost made it worse. “Go to the island,” he repeated. “You’ll both be safe there. Promise me.”

        “I will. I promise.” Jacob said, but really, what else could he say?

        “I thought I could protect you. Both of you.” he whispered then raised his head off my knees, trembling with the effort, and breathed into his ear: “Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940.” Jacob nodded but we could tell that he didn’t understand. With the last but of his strength, he added, “Emerson—the letter. Tell them what happened, _meyn lib_.”

        And with that, he sank back, spent and fading. Jacob told him he loved him. And with that, he seemed to disappear into himself, his gaze drifting past us to the sky, bristling with stars.

        I pressed my fingers to his neck once more: nothing, I gently shut his eyes and he looked peaceful. Despite all the blood and the dirt, he looked relaxed and we knew he was at peace now.

        A moment later Ricky crashed out of the underbrush. He saw me and Jacob in each other’s arms, tears streaming down our cheeks and our knees stained with blood and dirt, then he saw the old man limp with his head in my lap and fell back a step. “Oh man. Oh Jesus, oh _Jesus_ ,” he said, rubbing his face with his hands, and as he babbled about finding a pulse and calling the cops and did you see anything in the woods, Jacob let go of Grandpa Portman’s hand and, grabbing the flashlight, stood up, looking into the dark blackness of the woods around us.

        There was no moon and no movement in the underbrush but our own and yet he raised the flashlight at seemingly nothing. But for an instant in that narrow cut of light, we saw a face that seemed to have been transplanted directly from the nightmares of our childhood. My haunches raised and my skin prickled as it stared back with eyes that swam in dark liquid, furrowed trenches of carbon-black flesh loose on its hunched frame, its mouth hinged open grotesquely so that a mess of long eel-like tongues could wriggle out. Jacob shouted something and then it twisted and was gone, shaking the brush and drawing Ricky’s attention. He raised his .22 and fired, _pap-pap-pap-pap_ , saying, “What was that? What the hell was that?” But he hadn’t seen it and neither Jacob nor I could speak to tell him, frozen in place as we were, the dying flashlight flickering over the blank woods.

And then Jacob blacked out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Abe and Bea spoke in Polish. It'll be translated later in the story.


	4. Chapter II

        Jacob spent the months following his grandfather’s death cycling through a purgatory of beige waiting rooms and anonymous offices, analyzed and interviewed, talked about just out of earshot, nodding when spoken to, repeating himself, the object of a thousand pitying glances and knitted brows. His parents treated him like a breakable heirloom, afraid to fret in front of him lest he shatter.

        He was plagued by wake-up-screaming nightmares so bad that he had to wear a mouth guard to keep from grinding his teeth into nubs as he slept and when he woke, he would call me in the middle of the night—when I wasn’t already sleeping over—and I would always answer, my phone’s ringtone always turned up to 11, and I would sing him the Yiddish lullaby Abe would sing to us until he fell back into a restless sleep. He couldn’t close his eyes without seeing it—that tentacle-mouthed horror in the woods. He was convinced it had killed his grandfather (correctly, I might add) and that it would soon return for us, for _him_. Jacob would confide in me that sometimes a sick, panicky feeling would flood over him like it did that night and he’d be sure that nearby, lurking in a stand of dark trees, beyond the next car in a parking lot, behind the garage where he kept his bike, it was waiting.

        That summer, I basically lived at his house as his solution was to stop going outside. For weeks he even refused to venture into the driveway to collect the morning paper. We slept in a tangle of blankets on a king-sized air mattress on the laundry room floor, the only part of the house with no windows as well as a door that locked from the inside. That’s where we spent the day of grandpa’s funeral, sitting against the dryer with our laptops trying to lose ourselves in online games.

        Grandpa Portman’s death was hard on me too—I flinched at loud banging noises, like that of Ricky’s pistol and I couldn’t look at blood, even if it was in a movie, it just reminded me of the hours I spent in the shower afterwards, bawling my eyes out and desperately scrubbing at the dried blood stuck to my skin and, even when it looked like it was all gone, I still felt like I was dirty—but I was arguably more prepared. I even slept with the switchblade _Nonno_ gave me, clenched in my fist beneath my pillow, every night.

        But Jacob blamed himself for what happened. _If only I’d believed him_ was his endless refrain. But he hadn’t believed him and neither had anyone else, aside from myself, of course, and now Jacob knew how he must’ve felt because no one believed him either: except for me. And of course, our version of events sounded perfectly rational until we were forced to say it aloud, and then it sounded insane, particularly on the day we had to say them to the police officer who came to Jacob’s house. I let Jacob talk, selfishly pushing any hint of mental decline onto Jacob—I of course told him what I saw, and he believed me, but I knew he would be the only one, I was sure not even my parents would.

        Jacob told the officer everything that happened while I sat next to him, nodding or adding in what I saw. Jacob even told him about the creature, and he just sat nodding across the kitchen table, writing nothing in his spiral notebook. When Jacob had finished, all the cop said was “Great, thanks,” and then turned to Jacob’s parents and asked if he’d “been to see anyone,” as if we wouldn’t know what that meant. I told the cop we had another statement to make and we held our middle fingers up and walked out.

        Jacob’s parents sent me home so they could yell at him for the first time in weeks and he told me later, after I climbed through his (actual) bedroom window like I’d done so many times before, that it was kind of a relief, actually; that old sweet sound. He yelled some ugly things back. That they were glad Grandpa Portman was dead. That we were the only ones who’d really loved him, Jacob and I, one of which wasn’t even related to him.

        The cop and his parents talked in the driveway for a while, I snuck back into Jacob’s laundry room/bedroom, we sat and talked for a bit, and then the cop drove off only to come back an hour later with a man who introduced himself as a sketch artist. He’d brought a big drawing pad and asked Jacob to describe the creature again, and as he did—me sitting next to him once again and his parents giving me an exasperated look when they noticed—he sketched it, stopping occasionally to ask for clarifications.

        “How many eyes did it have?”

        We exchanged exasperated looks. “Two.” Jacob said.

        “Gotcha,” he said, as if monsters were a perfectly normal thing for a police sketch artist to be drawing.

        As an attempt to placate Jacob, it was pretty transparent—the biggest giveaway was when he tried to give him the finished sketch.

        “Don’t you need this for your files or something?” Jacob asked him.

        He exchanged raised eyebrows with the cop, “Of course. What was I thinking?”

        It was totally insulting, aside from the fact that the sketch looked _nothing_ like the actual monster.

        Even our best and only friend Ricky didn’t believe us, and he’d been there. He swore up and down that he hadn’t seen any creature in the woods that night—even though Jacob had shone his flashlight right at it—which is just what he told the cops. He’d heard barking though. We all had. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when the police concluded that a pack of feral dogs had killed our grandfather. Apparently they’d been spotted elsewhere and had taken bites out of a woman who’d been walking in Century Woods the week before. All at night, mind you. “Which is exactly when the creatures are hardest to see!” Jacob cried. But Ricky just shook his head and muttered something  about needing a “brain-shrinker.”

        “You mean a headshrinker.” I said.

        “Yeah,” Jacob butted in. “And thanks a lot. It’s great to have such supportive friends.” We were sitting on Jacob’s roof deck, watching the sun set over the Gulf, Ricky coiled like a spring in an unreasonably expensive Adirondack chair Jacob’s parents had brought back from a trip to Amish country, his legs folded beneath him and arms crossed tight, chain-smoking cigarettes with a kind of grim determination. He always seemed vaguely uncomfortable at Jacob’s house, but we could tell by the way his eyes slid off Jacob whenever he looked in his direction that now it wasn’t his parents’ wealth that was making him uneasy, but Jacob himself.

        “Whatever, I’m just being straight with you,” he said. “Keep talking about monsters and they’re gonna put you away. Then you really _will_ be Special Ed.”

        “Don’t call me that.”

        I felt bad but I couldn’t bring myself to disagree with Ricky. I had seen everything Jacob had, I had seen the monster and now when Jacob tried to tell anyone what we had seen that night, no one believed him—just like Abe.

        I brought my knees to my chest and frowned as Ricky flicked away his cigarette and spat a huge glistening wad over the railing.

        “Were you just smoking and chewing tobacco at the same time?” I asked, a little concerned for his well being.

        “What are you, my mom?”

        “Don’t talk to her like that.” said Jacob. “Besides, does it look like she blows truckers for food stamps?”

        Ricky was a connoisseur of your-mom jokes, but this was apparently more than he could take. He sprang out of the chair and shoved Jacob so hard he almost fell off the roof and I jumped up as well. Jacob yelled at him to get out, but Ricky was already going. I tried to talk to him, but he pushed past me and was gone.

        It was months before we’d see him again.

        “So much for having friends.” Jacob muttered, sitting down and wrapping his arms around the knees pulled up against his chest in the golden light of the setting sun.

✽✽✽

        Eventually, Jacob’s parents did take him to a brain-shrinker—a quiet, olive-skinned man named Dr. Golan. Jacob didn’t put up a fight. He knew he needed help.

        He thought he’d be a tough case, but Dr. Golan made surprisingly quick work of him. The calm, affectless way he explained things was almost hypnotizing, and within two sessions he’d convinced Jacob that the creature had been nothing more than the product of Jacob’s overheated imagination; that the trauma of his grandfather’s death had made him see something that wasn’t really there. It was Grandpa Portman’s stories that planted the creature into his mind to begin with, Dr. Golan explained, so it only made sense that, kneeling there with his body in his arms and reeling from the worst shock of his young life, Jacob had conjured up his grandfather’s own boogeyman.

        Of course, that didn’t explain how I’d seen the creature too and that I wasn’t out of my mind, and I told Jacob as much. He just chalked it up to me making the monster up as well. I knew that wasn’t the case but I simply said, “Maybe,” and continued taking Jacob to his therapy sessions and sitting in on them, one of his stipulations to actually go to therapy in the first place. I didn’t want Jacob to push me away either so I decided I’d suck it up until he was ready to know the truth.

        There was even a name for Jacob’s perceived condition: acute stress reaction. “I don’t see anything cute about it,” his mother said when she heard his shiny new diagnosis. We rolled our eyes but her joke didn’t bother him. Almost anything sounded better than crazy.

        He wasn’t crazy, though, I didn’t discount the stress, his nightmares were awful. The thing I did discount was the reasoning. What he saw was real, he just didn’t know it. I wanted to tell him, truly, but I had a promise to keep to Abe. Only when he was ready.

        However, just because he no longer believed the monsters were real didn’t mean he was better. He still suffered from pants-wetting nightmares. He was twitchy and paranoid, bad enough at interacting with other people that his parents hired a tutor—me—so that he only had to go to school on days he felt up to it. They also—finally—let him quit Smart Aid. “Feeling better” became his new job, and pretty soon, he was determined to be fired from this one too.

        Once the small matter of his temporary madness had been cleared up, Dr. Golan’s function seemed mainly to consist of writing prescriptions. Still having nightmares? I’ve got something for that. Panic attack in Bea’s car on the way to school? This should do the trick. Can’t sleep? Let’s up the dosage. All those pills were making him fat and stupid, and he was still miserable, getting only three or four hours of sleep a night—I knew because he would call me every time he woke up, when I wasn’t sleeping over, in a cold sweat; but I mean, what are friends for? But I was tired out of my mind, we both were.

        That’s why Jacob started lying to Dr. Golan. He pretended to be fine when anyone who looked at him could see the bags under his eyes and the way he jumped like a nervous cat at sudden noises. He even faked a dream journal for a whole week. He said he hadn’t even had _the dream_ even one night when in reality, he’d had _the dream_ every night that week!

        With minor variations, it always went like this: Jacob’s crouched in the corner of his grandfather’s bedroom, amber dusk-light retreating from the windows, pointing a pink plastic BB rifle at the door and wearing camo fatigues. I’m there as well, crouched next to him, holding a flashlight and my switchblade, dressed in army fatigues as well with bloodstains on the knees. An enormous glowing vending machine looms where the bed should be, filled not with candy or snacks, but with rows of razor-sharp tactical knives and armor-piercing pistols. His grandfather’s there in an old British army uniform, feeding the machine dollar bills, but it takes a lot to buy a gun and we’re running out of time. Finally, a shiny .45 spins toward the glass, but before it falls it gets stuck. He swears in Yiddish, kicks the machine, then kneels down and reaches inside to try and grab it, but his arm gets caught. That’s when they come, their long black tongues slithering up the outside of the glass, looking for a way in. Jacob points the BB gun at them and pulls the trigger, but nothing happens. Meanwhile, Grandpa Portman is shouting like a crazy person— _“Find the bird, find the loop, Yakob, vai don’t you understand you goddamned stupid yutzi”_ —and then the windows shatter and glass rains in and the black tongues are all over us, and that’s generally when Jacob wakes up in a puddle of sweat, his heart doing hurdles and his stomach tied in knots; and that’s generally when he calls me.

        Even though the dream was always basically the same and they’d been over it a hundred times, Dr. Golan still made him describe it in every session. It was like he was cross-examining Jacob’s subconscious, looking for some clue he might have missed the ninety-ninth time around.

        Jacob wanted to act like he didn’t care about the last words, but he did. They’d been eating away at him almost as much as the nightmares. He told me he felt like he owed it to his grandfather not to dismiss the last thing he said to anyone in the world as delusional nonsense, and Dr. Golan was convinced that understanding them might help him purge his awful dreams. So we tried.

        Some of what Grandpa Portman had said made sense to him, like the thing about wanting us to go to the island. He was worried that the monsters would come after us, and thought the island was the only place we could escape them, like he had as a kid. After that he’d told Jacob “I should’ve told you,” but, because there was no more time to tell him whatever it was he should’ve told him, Jacob wondered if he hadn’t done the next best thing and left a trail of breadcrumbs leading to someone who could tell him—someone who knew his secret, maybe it was someone by his side the whole time. Jacob figured that’s what all the cryptic-sounding stuff about the loop and the grave and the letter was and I could have slammed my head into a wall. It was really hard for me not to just up and say everything I knew but I promised my _nonno_ I’d let Jacob figure out the clues for himself and only tell him what I knew once we were safe. It was just a bit difficult considering I had to sit by and watch him basically shove a square block into a circular hole trying to figure out what Abe told him.

        Of course, I followed him as he researched his leads by doing things like driving him to the Circle Village community center to chat up the old folks to see if we could find a ‘Mr. Emerson’ or a ‘Loop Drive’ but, portraying exactly how I felt inside, they just looked at Jacob like he had two heads. It was a complete bust.

        Still, Dr. Golan wouldn’t let Jacob quit which I found odd. He seemed odd in general and, from the sessions Jacob insist I sit in on, I grew suspicious.

        Jacob’s last straw came a few days after getting unceremoniously ejected from the public library after falling asleep and waking up sweaty and screaming—long story, I know— when his family decided it was time to sell Grandpa Portman’s house. Before prospective buyers could be allowed inside, though, the place had to be cleaned out. On the advice of Dr. Golan, who thought it would be good for Jacob to “confront the scene of his trauma,” Jacob and I were enlisted to help his dad and Aunt Susie sort through the detritus. For a while after we got to the house, Jacob’s dad kept taking either him or me aside, to make sure he was okay or to check if he really was okay like I was his emotional support animal. Surprisingly though, he seemed to be, despite the scraps of police tape clinging to the shrubs and the torn screen on the lanai flapping in the breeze; these things—like the rented dumpster that stood on the curb, waiting to swallow what remained of his grandfather’s life—made him sad, not scared.

        Once it became clear that Jacob wasn’t about to suffer a mouth-frothing freakout, we got down to business. Armed with garbage bags, we proceeded grimly through the house, emptying shelves and cabinets and crawl spaces, discovering geometries of dust beneath objects unmoved for years. We built pyramids of things destined for the dumpster. His aunt and father were not sentimental people, and the dumpster pile was always the largest. We lobbied hard to keep certain things, like the eight-foot stack of water-damaged National Geographic magazines teetering in a corner of the garage—how many afternoons had we spent poring over them, imagining ourselves among the mudmen of New Guinea or discovering a cliff-top castle in the kingdom of Bhutan—but we were always overruled. Neither was he allowed to keep his grandfather’s collection of vintage bowling shirts (“They’re embarrassing,” his dad claimed), his big band and swing 78s (“Someone will pay good money for those”), or the contents of his massive, still-locked weapons cabinet (“You’re kidding, right? I hope you’re kidding”). I reassured him that he could sleep over and we’d sneak back here and take what we wanted but Jacob was starting to get upset.

        He told his dad he was being heartless. His aunt fled the scene—I was tempted to as well but decided against it—leaving us alone in the study, where we’d been sorting through a mountain of old financial records.

        “I’m just being practical. This is what happens when people die, Jacob.”

        “Yeah? How about when you die? Should I burn all your old manuscripts?”

        He flushed. We knew he shouldn’t have said it; mentioning his half-finished book projects was definitely below the belt. Instead of yelling at Jacob, though, he was quiet. “I brought you along today because I thought you were mature enough to handle it. I guess I was wrong.”

        “You are wrong. You think getting rid of all Grandpa’s stuff will make me forget him. But it won’t.”

        His dad threw up his hands. “You know what? I’m sick of fighting about it. Keep whatever you want.” He tossed a sheaf of yellowed papers at Jacob’s feet. “Here’s an itemized schedule of deductions from the year Kennedy was assassinated. Go have it framed!”

        Jacob kicked away the papers and walked out, slamming the door behind him. I only followed when Franklin got out the shredder and glared at me, “Aren’t you going to chase after him or something?” I scampered from the room and knew his dad wasn’t going to apologize when the shredder roared to life. I caught Jacob after he had stomped across the house just before he locked himself in the bedroom. It smelled of stale air and shoe leather and my _nonno’s_ slightly sour cologne. I breathed in the perfume and let out a small, sentimental sigh as I gently clicked the lock in place. I went to sit on the bed while Jacob leaned against the wall where I saw his eyes follow the trail of worn carpet from the door to where I sat. He came over and knelt down in a patch of muted sunlight and pulled out a smallish rectangular shaped item. It was the old cigar box, enveloped in dust—as if he’d left it there just for us and my heart started thumping; maybe Jacob would begin to figure out what Grandpa told him. I mean, let’s face it: I was getting frustrated with how long he was taking to take action—but that’s besides the point.

        Inside were the photos we knew so well: the invisible boy—my invisible boy—, the levitating girl, the boulder lifter, the man with a face painted on the back of his head. They were brittle and peeling and looking at them now, as almost adults, Jacob told me just how blatant the fakery was. But his observations were too subtle for a six-year-old, especially one who wanted to believe.

        Beneath those photos were five more that I knew Grandpa Portman had never shown Jacob. Three were “so obviously” manipulated that a kid would think they’d see right through: a girl trapped in a bottle, photographed so it looked like a laughable double exposure; another showing a levitating child, posed so it looked like she was suspended by something in the dark doorway behind her; the third was a dog with a boy’s face crudely “pasted” on it. Of course the photos didn’t look real, that was the point. It was to convince people of their oddness, but not enough so that they were totally real, effectively hiding the peculiar person or animal in each photo; keeping them safe while helping them earn a living on the money they made from selling these photos, that's just how things had to be.

        The last two snapshots, however, looked like something out of David Lynch’s wet dreams: one was an unhappy young contortionist doing a frightening backbend; in the other, a pair of freakish twins were dressed in the weirdest costumes. Even our grandfather, who’d filled our heads with stories of tentacle-tongued monsters, had realised images like these would give any kid bad dreams.

        With him kneeling there on his grandfather’s dusty floor with those photos in his hands, I remembered how betrayed Jacob had felt the day he’d “realised” Grandpa’s stories weren’t true.

        That was when Jacob closed the box and brought it into the living room, me on his heels, where his dad and Aunt Susie were emptying a drawer full of coupons, clipped but never used, into a ten-gallon trash bag and my heart ached for a moment.

        He offered up the box. They didn’t ask what was inside.

✽✽✽

        “That’s it?” I asked, frustrated. “His death was meaningless?”

        Jacob was sat on the giant beanbag in my room, staring at the posters and art taped to my walls. “Unless you’ve got a better idea,” he said. “Some big theory about what it all means that you haven’t told me. Otherwise . . .”

        In that moment, I wanted to strangle him. Of course I had a theory I hadn’t told him, hell, I had the truth! But I didn’t think it would be this difficult to guide him along. _Nonno give me strength._

        “Otherwise what?”

        “Otherwise it’s all just a waste of time.”

        I sighed and rubbed my hands down my face, trying to dispel the oncoming headache. “Well, that’s your opinion, but those were Grandpa’s last words to you, to anyone! What do you _really_ think they mean?”

        “Don’t start with the psychobabble bullshit, Bea, I already get enough of that from Dr. Golan,” he spat. “It’s not what I think that matters; it’s what’s true! But I guess we’ll never know, so who cares!”

        “I care, Jacob! We may not have been blood related but he was just as much my grandpa as he was yours!” I shouted. “Those were his last words on this Godforsaken planet. So they don’t just mean nothing!”

        “Oh yeah? Then what’d he say to you, huh?”

        I sighed but I figured if it would kick him in the right direction, then I might as well tell him.

        “He said “ _Dbaj o bezpieczeństwo Yakob. Pozwól mu znaleźć drogę na własną rękę. Powiedz mu, co wiesz, kiedy jesteś z ptakiem. Pamiętaj, czego cię nauczyłem. Jestem z was taki dumny. Tak bardzo was kocham.”_ ”

        “In English please?” he said pointedly.

        “What he said roughly translates to “Keep Yakob safe,”” I began in my best _Nonno_ voice. ““Let him find his way on his own. Tell him what you know when you’re with the bird. Remember what I taught you.”" I sniffled a little. "Then he said he was proud of us and that he loved us both so much.”

        “And what did you say?” Jacob said, softly this time.

        “I said we loved him too and that I promised to keep you safe.”

        My room was quiet aside from the waves crashing on a distant beach beyond my window and the gentle _whoosh_ of my ceiling fan. I decided to break the silence.

        “So . . . what do you think?”

        “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

        I didn’t either.

✽✽✽

        What I did know, though, was that Jacob could not have been less in the mood for a party, much less a surprise party. We’d known he was in for one the moment his parents began dropping unsubtle hints about how boring and uneventful the upcoming weekend was sure to be, when we all knew perfectly well  he was turning sixteen. Jacob had begged them to skip the party this year because, among other reasons, he couldn’t think of a single person he wanted to invite—aside from me, of course, but I was basically family so I was automatically on the guest list—but they worried that he spent so much time alone, still clinging to the notion that socialising was therapeutic. So was electroshock, he reminded them. But his mother was loathe to pass up even the flimsiest excuse for a celebration—she once invited friends over for their cockatiel’s birthday—in part because she loved to show off their house. Wine in hand, she’d herd guests from room to room, extolling the genius of the architect and telling war stories  about the construction (“It took months to get those sconces from Italy”).

        Jacob and I had just come home from yet another disastrous session with Dr. Golan. His dad greeted us at the door and we were following him into their suspiciously dark living room as he muttered things like “What a shame we didn’t plan anything for your birthday” and “Oh well, there’s always next year” when all the lights flooded on to reveal streamers, balloons and a motley assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins Jacob rarely spoke to—anyone his mother could cajole into attending, my mothers and Ricky, whom we were surprised to see lingering near the punchbowl, looking comically out of place in a studded leather jacket, included. Once everyone had finished cheering and Jacob had finished pretending to be surprised, Jacob’s mom stepped between us and slipped her arm around Jacob—she could really give less of a rat’s ass about me—whispering “Is this okay?” I knew he was upset and tired and just wanted to play Warspire III The Summoning and have me sleep over and fall asleep with the TV on. But what were we going to do, send everyone home? He said it was fine, and she smiled as if to thank him.

        “Who wants to see the new addition?” she sang out, pouring herself some more chardonnay before marching a troupe of relatives, and my moms, up the stairs.

        We nodded at Ricky from across the room, wordlessly agreeing to tolerate the others’ presence for an hour or two. Neither of us had spoken to him since the day he nearly shove Jacob off the roof and he hadn’t made an effort either, but we all understood the importance of maintaining the illusion of having friends plural. We were about to go talk to him when Jacob’s Uncle Bobby grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him into a corner, as he was oft to do. I sent Jacob a look but he only returned it with one telling me to go talk with Ricky, he knew I’d rescue him if the need be. I just shrugged and continued making my way over to Ricky where I grabbed myself a cup of punch and proceeded to lean up against the wall next to him.

        “Hey,” I said, taking a sip. “How’ve you been?”

        “I’m alright. You?”

        “Same.” It was quiet between us for a moment before Ricky cleared his throat.

        “Hey, I’m sorry about giving you and Jacob shit the other day. It’s just weird for me, y’know?”

        “Yeah, no, I get it. It’s kind of weird for all of us . . .  Just saying though, _probably_ shouldn’t smoke and chew at the same time.” I chuckled and he did too.

        “Yeah, I just get weird being here, you know?”

        “Oh totally, I‒” we were falling back into comfortable conversation when one of Jacob’s cousins cut us off by stepping between Ricky and I, uncomfortably close to me.

        “I don’t believe we’ve met.” he smirked and my face fell into my trademark Bitchface©️.

        “Really? I’ve been Jacob’s best friend for all of forever and I would think after years of you flirting at me at his birthday parties that you’d at least _kind of_ remember me.” I said dourly and Ricky snorted from behind the guy who shot him a sneer over his shoulder.

        Jacob’s cousin, whatever the hell his name was, opened his mouth to say something when Jacob’s mother announced it was time to open presents so I shot Ricky a quick glance saying ‘See you later,’ before scampering over to stand behind Jacob.

        She always insisted he do it in front of everyone, which was a problem because, as I may have mentioned already, Jacob was not a good liar. That also means he wasn’t good at feigning gratitude for regifted CDs of country Christmas music or subscriptions to Field and Stream—for years his Uncle Les had labored under the baffling delusion that Jacob was “outdoorsy”—but for decorum’s sake, he forced a smile and held up each wrapped trinket for all to admire until the pile of presents left on the coffee table had shrunk to three.

        He reached for the smallest one first. Inside, was the key to his parents’ four-year-old luxury sedan. They were getting a new one, his mom explained, so he was inheriting the old one. His first car! Everyone oohed and aahed, but I saw his face go hot and I could just tell he felt it was too much like showing off to accept such a lavish gift in front of Ricky, whose car cost less than his allowance at age twelve. It seemed like his parents were always trying to get him to care about money, but he didn’t, really. Then again, it’s easy to say you don’t care about money when you had plenty of it.

        The next present was the digital camera he’d begged his parents for all last summer.

        “Wow,” he said, testing the weight in his hand. “This is awesome.”

        “I’m outlining a new bird book,” his dad said. “I was thinking maybe you could take the pictures.”

        “A new book!” his mom exclaimed. “That’s a phenomenal idea, Frank. Speaking of which, whatever happened to that last book you were working on?” _Clearly_ , she’d had a few glasses of wine.

        “I’m still ironing out a few things,” his dad replied quietly, his face an unflattering shade of red.

        “Oh, I see.” We could here Uncle Bobby snickering.

        “Okay!” I said loudly, trying to defuse the situation, reaching for the last present before handing the wrapped package to the birthday boy. “This one’s from Aunt Susie.”

        “Actually,” his aunt said as he began tearing away the wrapping paper, “It’s from your grandfather.”

        Jacob stopped mid-tear. The room went dead quiet, people looked at Aunt Susie as if she’d invoked the name of some evil spirit. His dad’s jaw tensed and his mom shot back the last of her wine.

        “Just open it and you’ll see.” Aunt Susie said.

        Jacob and I exchanged looks before he ripped away the last of the paper to find an old hardback book, dog-eared and missing it’s dust jacket. It was _The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson_. He stared at it as if trying to read through the cover, unable to comprehend how it had come to occupy his now-trembling hands. No one but Doctor Golan, Jacob and I knew about the last words and Golan had promised on several occasions that unless Jacob was going to guzzle Drano or do a backflip off the Sunshine Skyway bridge, everything we had talked about in his office would be held in confidence.

        He looked at his aunt, a question on his face that I could tell he didn’t quite know how to ask. She managed a weak smile and said, “I found it in your grandfather’s desk when we were cleaning out the house. He wrote both of your names in the front. I think he meant for you to have it.”

        God bless Aunt Susie. She did have a heart after all.

        “Neat. I didn’t know your grandpa was a reader,” his mom said. “That was thoughtful.”

        “Yes,” said his dad through clenched teeth. “Thank you, Susan.”

        Jacob opened the book and I leaned over his shoulder to get a better look. Sure enough, the title page bore an inscription in _Nonno’s_ shaky handwriting:

_To Jacob Magellan Portman and Beatrice Clementine LeClair-Vista, and the worlds they have yet to discover._

        Jacob got up to leave, tears starting to fill his eyes and something slipped out from between the yellowed pages and fell to the floor.

        He bent to pick it up. It was a letter.

_Emerson. The letter._

        The blood drained from his face. His mother leaned towards him and in a tense whisper, asked  him if he needed a drink of water which was mom-speak for _keep it together, people are staring_. He said, “I feel a little, uh . . .” and then, with one hand over his stomach, he bolted.

        The room was silent and still for a moment before I started backing out, saying, “I’ll just, uh . . . I’m, gonna go check on him.”

        And I bolted too.

✽✽✽

        I followed Jacob to his room where he sat on his bed with the letter in his hands. I climbed onto the bed to sit next to him and read it over his shoulder.

        The letter was handwritten on fine, unlined paper in a looping script so ornate it was almost calligraphy, the black ink varying in tone like that of an old fountain pen. It read:

_Dearest Abe,_

_I hope this note finds you safe & in the best of health. It’s been such a long time since we last received word from you! But I write not to admonish, only to let you know that we still think of you often and pray for your well-being. Our brave, handsome Abe! _

_As for life on the island, little has changed. But quiet and orderly is the way we prefer things! I wonder if we would recognise you after so many years, though I’m certain you’d recognise us—those few who remain, that is. It would mean a great deal to have a recent picture of you, if you’ve one to send. I’ve included a positively ancient snap of myself._

_E misses you terribly. Won’t you write to her?_

_With respect and admiration,_

_Headmistress Alma Lefay Peregrine_

        As promised, the writer had enclosed an old snapshot.

        Jacob held it under the glow of his desk lamp, trying to read some detail in the woman’s silhouetted face, but there was none to find. The image was so strange, and yet it was nothing like my _nonno’s_ pictures. There were no ‘tricks’ here. It was just a woman _—_ a woman, smoking a pipe. It looked like Sherlock Holmes’ pipe, curved and drooping from her lips. His eyes kept coming back to it.

        Was this what _Nonno_ had meant for Jacob to find? Yes, it had to be, however, grandpa had only mentioned anything about Emerson once or twice, and I told Jacob this.

        “Not the letters of Emerson, but a letter, tucked inside Emerson’s book.” I breathed.

        “But who’s this Peregrine woman?” Jacob asked. He studied the envelope for a return address but found only a fading postmark that read Cairnholm Is., Cymru, UK.

        UK was England, that much was obvious.

        I pointed to the dragon symbol stamped onto the paper. “Cymru, that means Wales,” I said. “That’s where my mum is from. Cairnholm Island had to be the island Miss Peregrine mentioned in the letter.” I said, gently leading him to some sort of conclusion.

        “Do you think that’s the island where Grandpa lived as a kid?” he asked and I nodded.

        Jacob sighed.

        “Nine months ago he’d told me to ‘find the bird’. Nine years ago he had sworn that the children’s home where he’d lived was protected by one—by a bird who’d smoked a pipe.” I listened quietly as he babbled on, afraid that if I said anything I’d cut off his thinking. “At age seven I’d taken that statement literally, but the headmistress in this picture is smoking a pipe, and her name’s Peregrine, a kind of hawk. What if the bird Grandpa wanted us to find is actually the woman who’d rescued him—the headmistress of the children’s home? Maybe she’s still on the island, after all these years, probably old as dirt but sustained by a few of her wards, children who’d grown up but never left.”

        We sat in comfortable, contemplative silence and, for the first time, I felt like Jacob was finally able to make a strange kind of sense of our grandfather’s last words. He wanted Jacob and I to go to the island and find this woman, his old headmistress. If anyone knew the secrets of his childhood, it would be her.

        “Do you think it’s possible she’s still alive?” Jacob asked.

        “If she’d been running the children’s home in 1939 and was, say, twenty-five at the time, then she’d be in her late nineties today.” I said, just trying to get him to even consider going to the island. “It’s possible—there are people older than that in Englewood who live by themselves and still drive—and even if Miss Peregrine had passed in the time that she’d sent this letter, there still might be people living on Cairnholm who could help us, people who had known Grandpa Portman as a kid. People who knew his secrets.” I pointed at the letter still clutched in Jacob’s hand. “ _We_ , she wrote. _Those few who remain_.”

✽✽✽

        As you can imagine, convincing Jacob’s parents to let him spend part of the summer on a tiny island off the coast of Wales was no easy task. They—particularly his mother—had many compelling reasons why this was a terrible idea, including the cost, the fact that he was supposed to spend the summer with his Uncle Bobby learning how to run a drug empire, and that he had no one to accompany him, not that I wasn’t going with him, they just meant adult accompaniment and they didn’t entirely trust my sanity either. Jacob had no effective rebuttals, and his reason for wanting to take the trip—I think I’m supposed to—wasn’t something he could explain without sounding even crazier than they already feared he was. He certainly wasn’t going to tell his parents about Grandpa Portman’s last words or the letter or the photo—they would’ve had Jacob committed. The only sane-sounding arguments he could come up with were things like, “I want to learn more about our family history” or the never-persuasive “Chad Kramer and Josh Bell are going to Europe this summer. Why can’t I?” and my own “That’s where my grandma was from and I want to bring Jacob.” He brought those up as frequently as possible without seeming desperate (even once resorting to “it’s not like you don’t have the money,” a tactic he instantly regretted), but it looked like it wasn’t going to happen. So, I tried talking to my parents.

        I sat down my moms in our living room and took a breath. I decided to tell them everything.

        “So, you know Abraham Portman. Well . . .”

✽✽✽

        As I was finishing my tale of what had been going on for about the last ten years of my life, I noticed my hands shaking and sweating—of course I was nervous, I was dropping a bombshell on my parents! But I steeled myself and continued on.

        “And now Jacob is actually starting to put the pieces together and we need to go to Wales, the island of Cairnholm specifically.” I said, finally feeling some of the weight come off my shoulders and I held my breath as my moms shared a look I couldn’t quite discern.

        “Yeah, we know,” my mum, Nora, said, shocking me. They must have seen a look on my face because they both chuckled.

        “ _Cara mia_ , you know how we always used to call you ‘our peculiar little girl’?” Mamá, Mara, said and I nodded. “It’s because we knew.”

        “How?” I asked, baffled. I was sure to be careful around everyone, especially my moms.

        “Because _we_ are peculiar.”

        “Your mamá is clairevoyant—” my mum began.

        “And your mum is an oneiromantic.” My mamá cut in.

        “And do you know what that means?” Mum asked with a gentle smile on her face.

        “You can see the future.” I whispered in awe, eyes wide and questions suddenly answered.

        “Right. An oneiromantic is a prophetic dreamer, I can’t control what I see, but your Mamá,” Mum said, giving a loving look at my mamá and sounding like the professor she was, “She has precognition, she doesn’t have to be asleep to see and can focus on _when_ she wants to see.”

        “In fact,” Mamá interjected, kneeling before me in my chair and grabbing my hand in hers. “Your mum, the night before you were born, had a dream; about you and how importantly peculiar you are. I only supplemented what she already knew.”

        They were always like this: supporting each other and elevating the other’s accomplishments before their own. I loved my family and knew they loved me, but that didn’t stop me before from fearing their reaction.

        “So you aren’t going to ship me away?” I asked, my voice getting thick and lip quivering.

        “ _Feinwen_ , why would we?” Mum asked, kneeling next to my Mamá, her normally softly smiling face morphing into one of concern.”

        “I th-thought you w-ould think I was a f-f-f, a f-freak and that you wouldn’t w-want me anymore.” I blubbered and both my moms extended their arms and pulled me into their warm embrace. They began shushing me and petting my hair and cooing at me, switching between Welsh, Italian and English, as I cried against their chests. But I wasn’t crying out of sadness or fear, but of joy.

_I wasn’t alone anymore._

✽✽✽

        Over the next few weeks, several things happened in fairly quick succession that helped Jacob’s case enormously.

        First, my parents immediately signed on board and even offered to chaperone and pay for Jacob’s flight as well as our own, but his parents declined—it always seemed like my moms made them uncomfortable much in the way Ricky did; I think it was because they were “different,” but that’s besides the point. Next, his Uncle Bobby got cold feet about Jacob spending the summer with him—because who willingly wants a nutcase living in their house? So, his schedule was suddenly wide open. Then, his dad learned that Cairnholm Island was a super-important bird habitat and, like, half the world’s population of some bird that gives him a total ornithology boner lives there. He started talking a lot about his hypothetical new bird book and whenever the subject came up, we did our bests to encourage him and sound interested; it probably helped that I was actually _somewhat_ interested in birds (and not a terrible liar). But the most important factor was Dr. Golan. After a surprisingly minimal amount of coaxing by Jacob and lying my ass off by me, he shocked us all by not only signing off on the idea, but also encouraging Jacob’s parents to let him go.

        “It could be important for him,” he told Jacob, his parents and I after a session one afternoon that they basically demanded to sit in on. “It’s a place that’s been so mythologized by his grandfather that visiting could only serve to demystify. He’ll see that it’s just as normal and unmagical as anyplace else, and, by extension, his grandfather’s fantasies will lose their power. It could be a highly effective way of combating fantasy with reality.”

        “But I thought he already didn’t believe that stuff,” Jacob’s mother asked, turning to him. “Do you Jake?”

        “I don’t,” he assured her and I frowned a little to myself. When I looked up, I was immediately uncomfortable when I met Dr. Golan’s gaze, boring into me with an odd intensity behind his small, round lenses. The longer I looked, the more my frown deepened, the more uncomfortable I grew, and the more confused I became when I noticed his eyes had an odd artificial appearance to them.

        “Not consciously he doesn’t,” Dr. Golan said, holding eye contact for a second longer before breaking away and I felt a chill run down my spine. “But it’s his unconscious that’s causing him problems right now: the dreams; the anxiety.”

 _Unconscious? Didn’t he mean subconscious? Shouldn’t he know the difference?_ I shifted for a second, confused, and raised my hand a little before saying,

        “Um, Dr. Golan, did you mean‒”

        “Beatrice!” Jacob’s mom hissed.  I was flabbergasted. I didn’t know why but it felt like she had slapped me across the face. My eyes were wide and I opened and closed my mouth like a fish gasping for air, but I couldn’t find any of the right words so I just averted my gaze and turned an unflattering shade of crimson as she continued, “And do you really think going there could help?” she said, narrowing her eyes at Dr. Golan as if readying herself to hear the unvarnished truth. When it came to things Jacob should or should not be doing, Dr. Golan’s word was law.

        “I do,” he replied, his soft, doctorly smile now looking quite menacing.

        But that was all it took.

✽✽✽

        After that, things fell into place with astonishing speed. Plane tickets were bought, schedules scheduled, plans laid. Hell, I even turned seventeen. Jacob’s dad, Jacob and I would go for three weeks in June. Jacob wondered if that was way too long, but his dad claimed that he needed at least that much time to make a thorough study of the island’s bird colonies. We thought his mom would object—three whole weeks!—but the closer our trip got, the more excited for us she seemed. “My two men,” she would beam, “—and Beatrice—off on a big adventure!”

        We found her enthusiasm kind of touching, actually—until the afternoon Jacob heard her talking on the phone to a friend, venting about how relieved she’d be to “have her life back” for three weeks and not have “two needy children to worry about.”

        Jacob wanted to say something with as much hurtful sarcasm as he could muster, but she hadn’t seen him and he kept quiet. He did love her, of course, but he revealed to me that it was mostly because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone he thinks he’d like very much if he met her walking down the street; which she wouldn’t be, anyway; ‘walking is for poor people.’ And, though I didn’t blame him, that made me kind of sad.

        During the three-week window between the end of school and the start of our trip, Jacob, with my secretly frustrated help, did his best to verify that Ms. Alma Lefay Peregrine still resided among the living in Cairnholm, but internet searches turned up nothing. Assuming she was still alive, Jacob had hoped to get her on the phone and at least warn her that we were coming, but we soon discovered that almost no one on the island even _had_ a phone. We found only one number for the entire island, so that’s the one we dialled.

        It took nearly a minute to connect, the line on speaker loudly hissing and clicking, so that we could feel every mile of the vast distance our call was spanning.

        Finally we heard that strange European ring— _waaap-waaap . . . waaap-waaap_ —and a man whom we could only assume was profoundly intoxicated answered the phone.

        “Pisshole!” he bellowed and we started. There was an unholy amount of noise in the background, the kind of dull roar you’d expect at the height of a raging frat party. We tried to identify ourselves, but I don’t think he could hear us.

        “Pisshole!” he bellowed again. “Who’s this now?” But before either of us could say anything, he’d pulled the receiver away from his head to shout at someone. “I said shaddup, ya dozy bastards, I’m on the‒”

        And then the line went dead. Jacob sat with his house phone receiver in his hand for a long, puzzled moment, then hung it up. We didn’t bother calling back. If Cairnholm’s only phone connected to some den of iniquity called the “Pisshole,” how did that bode for the rest of the island? Would our first trip to Europe be spent evading drunken maniacs and watching birds evacuate their bowels on rocky beaches? Maybe so but, even though I could feel a little rock of doubt grow heavy in the pit of my stomach, if it meant that we’d finally be able to put our grandfather’s mystery at rest, anything we had to endure would be worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cara Mia - My Dear in Italian  
> Feinwen - Sweetheart in Welsh


	5. Chapter III

        Fog closed around us like a blindfold. When the captain announced that we were nearly there, at first we thought he was kidding; all we could see from the ferry’s rolling dock was an endless curtain of grey. Jacob clutched the rail and stared into the green waves, most likely contemplating the fish who might soon be enjoying his breakfast while I tenderly rubbed his back and his father stood shivering beside us in shirtsleeves. It was colder than we’d ever known June could be. I hoped, for all our sakes, that the grueling thirty-six hours we’d braved to get this far—three airplanes, two layovers, shift-napping in grubby train stations, and now this interminable gut-churning ferry ride—would pay off. Then, as I patted Jacob’s back, murmuring his name, his father shouted, “Look!” and Jacob raised his head to see a towering mountain of rock emerge from the blank canvas before us.

        It was my  _ nonno _ ’s island. Looming and bleak, folded in mist, guarded by a million screeching birds, it looked like some ancient fortress constructed by giants. As we gazed up at its sheer cliffs, tops disappearing in a reef of ghostly clouds, the idea that this was a magical place didn’t seem so ridiculous.

        Jacob’s nausea seemed to vanish. His dad ran around like a kid on Christmas, his eyes glued to the birds wheeling above us. “Jacob, Beatrice, look at that!” He cried, pointing to a cluster of airborne specks. “Manx Shearwaters!”

        As we drew nearer the cliffs, Jacob and I began to notice odd shapes lurking underwater. A passing crewman caught us leaning over the rail to stare at them and said, “Never seen a shipwreck before, eh?”

        We turned to him. “Really?” Jacob asked.

        “This whole area’s a nautical graveyard. It’s like old captains used to say— _ Twixt Hartland Point and Cairnholm Bay is a sailor’s grave by night or day _ !”

        Just then we passed a wreck so near the surface, the outline of its greening carcass so clear, that it looked like it was about to rise out of the water like a zombie from a shallow grave. “See that one?” he said, pointing at it. “Sunk by a U-boat, she was.”

        “There were U-boats around here?” Jacob asked again.

        “Of course,” I replied before the crewman could. “Loads! The whole Irish Sea was so rotten with German subs that I bet you’d have half a navy on your hands if you could unsink all the ships they’d torpedoed.”

        I was a little embarrassed at my little outburst, but Jacob gave me a look I could only describe as awestruck. The crewman chuckled heartily and clapped me on the back. “Smart lass, she is. Don’t let her go, boy.” he winked at Jacob and before we could explain that Jacob and I weren’t an item, he was gone, laughing the whole way.

        We shrugged before jogging along the deck to the stern, tracking the shipwreck as it disappeared beneath our wake. Then, just as we began wondering if we’d need climbing gear to get onto the island, its steep cliffs sloped down to meet us. We rounded a headland to enter a rocky little half-moon bay. In the distance we saw a little harbor bobbing with colorful fishing boats, and beyond it a town set into a green bowl of land. A patchwork of sheep-speckled fields across hills that rose away to meet a high ridge, where a wall of clouds stood like a cotton parapet. It was dramatic and beautiful, unlike any place we’d ever seen. I felt a little thrill of adventure as we chugged into the bay, and I felt Jacob’s excitement as well, as if we were sighting land where maps had noted only a swath of undistinguished blue.

        The ferry docked and we humped our bags into the little town. Upon closer inspection I decided it was, like a lot of things, not as pretty up close as it seemed from a distance. Nonetheless, I was enchanted by just being there. Whitewashed cottages, quaint except for the satellite dishes sprouting from their roofs, lined a small grid of muddy gravel streets. Because Cairnholm was too distant and too inconsequential to justify the cost of running power lines from the mainland, foul-smelling diesel generators buzzed on every corner like angry wasps, harmonizing with the growl of tractors, the island’s only vehicular traffic. At the edges of town, ancient-looking cottages stood abandoned and roofless, evidence of a shrinking population, children lured away from centuries-old fishing and farming traditions by more glamorous opportunities elsewhere.

        We dragged our stuff through town looking for something called the ‘Priest Home’ where Jacob’s dad booked a couple rooms. I pictured an old church converted into a bed and breakfast—nothing fancy, just somewhere to sleep and eat when we weren’t watching birds or chasing down leads. Jacob and his dad asked a few locals for directions and only got confused looks in return. “They speak English, right?” his dad asked, so I decided to try my hand at asking in Welsh which, much to my surprise, worked. I thanked them and ran off after Jacob and his dad to tell them what I had learned. They’d found a church and entered it and, despite knowing it wasn’t what we were looking for, I entered soon after. Stopping to catch my breath, I looked up to see not a church, but a dingy little museum.

        We found the part-time curator in a room hung with old fishing nets and sheep shears. His face lit up when he saw us, then fell when he realised we were only lost.

        “I reckon you’re after the Priest Hole,” he said. “It’s got the only rooms to let on the island.”

        He proceeded to give us directions in a lilting accent, which I found enormously endearing. I loved hearing Welsh people talk, especially because it reminded me of my mum and home and made me feel less weird about my own Welsh/Italian/American accent, if you can even call it that. Jacob’s dad thanked the man and turned to go, but he’d been so helpful and Jacob and I hung back to ask him another question or two.

        “Where can we find the old children’s home?” Jacob asked.

        “The old what?” he said, squinting at Jacob.

        I could see a flash of fear rush over his face. I knew we were on the right island and nothing was a figment of Grandpa Portman’s imagination, so I felt completely calm; just because this man didn’t know of it didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Jacob, however, began to panic a bit.

        “It was a home for refugee kids?” he said. “During the war? A big house?”

        The man chewed his lip and regarded us doubtfully, as if deciding whether to help or to wash his hands of the whole thing. But he seemed to take pity on us. “I don’t know about any refugees,” he said, “but I think I know the place you mean. It’s way up the other side of the island, past the bog and through the woods. Though I wouldn’t go mucking about up there alone, if I was you. Stray too far from the path and that’s the last anyone’ll hear of you—nothing but wet grass and sheep patties to keep you from going straight over a cliff.”

        “That’s good to know,” Jacob’s dad said. “Promise me you won’t go by yourself.”

        “Alright, alright.”

        “What’s your interest in it, anyhow?” the curator asked. “It’s not exactly on the tourist maps.”

        “Just a little genealogy project,” Jacob’s father replied, lingering near the door. “My dad spent a few years there as a kid.” We could tell he was eager to avoid any mention of psychiatrists or dead grandfathers. He thanked the man again and ushered Jacob out the door. I stayed a second more to thank him in Welsh— _ Diolch _ —before scurrying after them.

        Following the curator’s directions, we retraced our steps until we came to a grim-looking statue carved from black stone, a memorial call the Waiting Woman dedicated to islanders lost  at sea. She wore a pitiful expression and stood with arms outstretched in the direction of the harbor, many blocks away, but also towards the Priest Hole, which was directly across the street. Now, I’m no hotel connoisseur, but one glance at the weathered sign told me our stay was unlikely to be a four-star mints-on-your-pillow type experience. Oh well. Printed in giant script at the top was  _ WINES, ALES, SPIRITS _ . Below that, in more modest lettering,  _ Fine Food _ , and handwritten along the bottom, clearly an afterthought, was  _ Rooms to Let _ , though the  _ s _ had been struck out, leaving just the singular  _ Room _ . As we lugged our bags toward the door, Jacob’s father grumbling about con men and false advertising, Jacob and I looked back at the waiting woman and I wondered if she wasn’t just waiting for someone to bring her a drink.

        We squeezed our bags through the doorway and stood blinking in the sudden gloom of a low-ceilinged pub. When our eyes had adjusted, I realised that  _ hole _ was a pretty accurate description of the place: tiny leaded windows admitted just enough light to find the beer tap without tripping over tables and chairs on the way. The tables, worn and wobbling, looked like they might be more useful as firewood. The bar was half-filled, at whatever hour of the morning it was, with men in various states of hushed intoxication, heads bowed prayerfully over tumblers of amber liquid.

        “You must be after the room,” said the man behind the bar, coming out to shake our hands. “I’m Kev and these are the fellas. Say hullo, fellas.”

        “Hullo,” they muttered, nodding at their drinks.

        We followed Kev up a narrow staircase to a suite of rooms (plural!) that could charitably be described as basic. There were two bedrooms, the larger of which Jacob’s dad had claimed, despite Jacob and I having to share a room, and a room that tripled as a kitchen, dining room, and living room, meaning that it contained one table, one moth-eaten sofa, and one hot-plate. The bathroom worked “most of the time,” according to Kev, “but if it ever gets dicey, there’s always Old Reliable.” He directed our attention to a portable toilet in the alley out back, conveniently visible from Jacob and I’s bedroom window.

        “Oh, and you’ll need these,” he said, fetching a pair of oil lamps from a cabinet. “The generators stop running at ten since petrol’s so bloody expensive to ship out, so either you get to bed early or you learn to love candles and kerosene.” He grinned. “Hope it ain’t too medieval for ya!”

        We assured Kev that kerosene and outhouses would be just fine, sounded like fun, in fact—a little adventure, yessir—and then he led us downstairs for the final leg of our tour. “You’re welcome to take your meals here,” he said, “and I expect you will, on account of there’s nowhere else to eat. If you need to make a call, we got a phone box in the corner there. Sometimes there’s a bit of a queue for it, though, since we get doodly mobile reception out here and you’re looking at the only land-line on the island. That’s right, we got it all—only food, only bed, only phone!” And he leaned back and laughed, long and loud.

        The only phone on the island. We looked over at it—it was the kind that had a door you could pull shut for privacy, like in the old movies—and Jacob and I looked at each other in horror as we realised that  _ this _ was the Grecian orgy,  _ this _ was the raging frat party we had been connected to when we called the island a few weeks ago.  _ This was the piss hole _ .

        Kev handed Jacob’s dad the keys to our rooms. “Any questions,” he said, “you know where to find me.”

        “I have a question,” Jacob said. “What’s a piss‒I mean, a priest hole?”

        The men at the bar burst into laughter. “Why, it’s a hole for priests, of course!” one said, which made the rest of them laugh even harder.

        Kev walked over to an uneven patch of floorboards next to the fireplace, where a mangy dog lay sleeping that I really wanted to pet but decided to leave it for another time, “Right here,” he said, tapping what appeared to be a door in the floor with his shoe. “Ages ago, when just being a Catholic could get you hung from a tree, clergyfolk came here seeking refuge. If Queen Elizabeth’s crew of thugs came chasing after ‘em, we hid whoever needed hiding in snug little spots like this—priest holes.” It struck me the way he said  _ we _ , as if he had known those long-dead standers personally.

        “Snug indeed!” one of the drinkers said. “Bet they were warm as toast and tight as drums down there!”

        “I’d take warm and snug to strung up by priest killers any day,” said another.

        “Here, here!” the first man said. “To Cairnholm—may she always be our rock of refuge.”

        “To Cairnholm!” they chorused, and raised their glasses together.

✽✽✽

        Jet-lagged and exhausted, we went to sleep early —or rather, we went to our beds and lay in them with an earbud in each ear between Jacob and I and pillows covering our heads to block out the thumping cacophony that issued through the floorboards, which grew so loud that at one point Jacob thought surely the revelers had invaded our room. Then the clock must’ve struck ten because all at once the buzzing generators outside sputtered and died, as did the music downstairs and the street light that had been shining through our window. Suddenly we were cocooned in silent, blissful darkness with only the gentle pumping of music through my headphones, the whisper of distant waves, and each other’s breathing to remind us where we were. It was actually so peaceful, I fell asleep without music in my ears to distract me from my own thoughts.

        For the first time in months, Jacob fell into a deep, nightmare-free slumber and I, by proxy, had one of the best nights of rest in months and I didn’t wake up once with my switchblade—that I somehow managed to smuggle through customs—clutched in my fist so tight my knuckles would turn white and my fingers would be sore and stiff. It was nice.

        Once we woke up, awoken by warm, gentle streams of sunlight caressing our faces rather than a screeching alarm, Jacob told me what he dreamed about. Instead of the usual nightmare, he dreamt instead of his grandfather as a boy, about his first night here, a stranger in a strange land, under a strange roof, owing his life to people who spoke a strange tongue. He told me when he awoke, sun caught in his hair and eyes making them light up and shine, he realised it wasn’t just his grandfather’s life Miss Peregrine had saved, but his, too, and his father’s, even mine. And that today, with any luck, he would finally get to thank her.

        We went downstairs to find Jacob’s dad already bellied up to a table, slurping coffee and polishing his fancy binoculars. Just as we sat down, Kev appeared bearing three plates loaded with mystery meat and fried toast. “I didn’t know you could fry toast,” Jacob remarked, to which Kev replied that there wasn’t a food he was aware of that couldn’t be approved by frying.

        Over breakfast, Jacob, his dad and I discussed our plan for the day as the mangy dog from yesterday laid his head on my lap as I pet him and snuck him scraps. Today was to be a kind of scont, to familiarize ourselves with the island. We’d scope out his dad’s bird-watching spots first and then find the children’s home. Jacob scarfed down his food, obviously anxious to get started. 

        Well-fortified with grease, we left the pub and walked through town, dodging tractors and shouting to each other over the din of the generators until the streets gave way to fields and the noise faded behind us. It was a crisp and blustery day—the sun hiding behind giant cloud banks only to burst moments later and dapple the hills with spectacular rays of light—and Jacob and I felt energized and hopeful. We were heading for a rocky beach where Jacob’s dad had spotted a bunch of birds from the ferry. I wasn’t sure how we would reach it, though—the island was slightly bowl-shaped, with hills that climbed toward its edges only to drop off at precarious seaside cliffs—but at this particular spot the edge had been rounded off and a path led down to a minor spit of sand along the water.

        We picked our way down to the beach, where what seemed to be an entire civilization of birds were flapping and screeching and fishing in tide pools. We watched his father’s eyes widen. “Fascinating,” he muttered, scraping at some petrified guano with the stubby end of his pen. “I’m going to need some time here. Is that alright?”

        We’d seen this look on his face before, and we knew  _ exactly _ what “some time” meant: hours and hours. “Then we’ll go find the house ourselves,” Jacob said.

        “Not alone, you aren’t. You promised.”

        “We won’t be alone, Dad. We have each other.”

        “You know what I mean, Jacob.”

        “Fine. Then we’ll find a person who can take us.”

        “Who?”

        “Kev will know someone.”

        His dad looked out to sea, where a big rusted lighthouse jutted up from a pile of rocks. “You know what the answer would be if your mom were here,” he said.

        Jacobs parents had, simply put, differing theories about how much parenting Jacob required, even before his decline in mental health. His mom was the enforcer, always hovering, but his dad preferred to hang back a little. He thought it was important that Jacob make his own mistakes now and then. Also, letting us go would free him to play with guano all day, so the odds were in our favour.

        “Okay,” he said, “but make sure you leave me the number of whoever you go with.”

        “Dad, nobody here has phones.”

        He sighed, obviously distracted with the thoughts of the day ahead of him. “Right, well, as long as they’re reliable.”

✽✽✽

        Kev was out running an errand, and because asking one of the drunken regulars to chaperone us seemed like a bad idea, we went to the nearest shop to ask someone who was at least gainfully employed. The door read  _ FISHMONGER _ . Jacob held open the door for me to find ourselves cowering before a bearded giant in a blood-soaked apron. He left off decapitating fish to almost glare at us, dripping cleaver in hand, and we silently vowed never again to discriminate against the intoxicated.

        “What the hell for?” he growled at Jacob when he told him where we wanted to go. “Nothing over there but bogland and barmy weather.”

        I explained about our  _ nonno _ and the children’s home. He frowned at me, less harshly than the one he had just directed at Jacob, then leaned over the counter to cast a doubtful glance at our shoes. 

        “I s’pose Dylan ain’t too busy to take you,” he said, pointing his cleaver at a kid about our age who was arranging fish in a freezer case, “but you’ll be wantin’ proper footwear. Wouldn’t do to let you go in them trainers—mud’ll suck’em right off!”

        “Really?” Jacob asked. “Are you sure?”

        “Dylan! Fetch our guests here a couple ‘o pairs of wellingtons!”

        The kid groaned and made a big show of slowly closing the freezer case and cleaning his hands before slouching over to a wall of shelves packed with dry goods.

        “Just so happens we’ve got some good sturdy boots on offer,” the fishmonger said. “Buy one get none free!” He burst out laughing and slammed his cleaver on a salmon, its head shooting across the blood-slicked counter to land perfectly in a little guillotine bucket. I jumped when the knife hit the carving block but I nervously chuckled along anyway.

        We fished our emergency money from our pockets, figuring that a little extortion was a small price to pay to find the woman we’d crossed the Atlantic to meet.

        We left the shop each wearing a pair of rubber boots so large our sneakers fit inside and so heavy it was difficult to keep up with our begrudging guide.

        However, he at least seemed to appreciate my company much more than Jacob’s, both to our chagrin.

        “So do you go to school on the island?” Jacob asked Dylan, scurrying to catch up. We were genuinely curious—what was living here like for someone our age?

        He simply muttered the name of a town on the mainland.

        “What is that, an hour each way by ferry?” I asked and this time, Dylan seemed to perk up at the sound of my voice, physically straightening up and gaining a slight smirk to his face.

        “Yup, it’s the worst, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be too bad if you were to come with,” he flirted and an awkward smile graced my face, I looked over my shoulder to see Jacob looking quite displeased—and understandably so, some random bloke was flirting with what was basically his sister. I gave him a look before just turning back and listening as Dylan talked at me and I occasionally nodded or laughed at a bad joke or an attempt at flirting: I just figured it would do no good to put off our tour guide.

        Jacob tried butting in every once in a while but Dylan either barely responded or just ignored him altogether so he finally just gave up and focused on trudging along behind us. On the way out of town we ran into one of Dylan’s friends, a slightly older boy wearing a blinding yellow tracksuit with an equally as blinding yellow bucket hat and fake gold chains. He gave Dylan an unnecessarily complex fist-bump and turned to me.  _ Oh joy _ .

        He bowed slightly and extended his hand and, to avoid any awkwardness by declining and being overly polite, I placed my hand in his.

        “And who might this lovely little bird be?” he asked.

        “Oh, uh, I’m Beatrice and this is my friend‒”

        “Beatrice! Pretty name for a pretty girl,” he smirked, kissing the top of my hand and I felt the bile rise in my throat. “You can call me Worm.”

        “Worm?” Jacob asked from somewhere behind me.

        “It’s his stage name,” Dylan explained.

        “We’re the sickest rapping duo in Wales,” Worm said. “I’m MC Worm and this is the Sturgeon Surgeon, aka Dirty Dylan, aka MC Dirty Bizniss, Cairnholm’s number one beatboxer. Wanna show this Yank and this little lady how we do, Dirty D?”

        Dylan looked annoyed. “Now?”

        “Drop some next-level beats, son!”

        Dylan rolled his eyes but did as he was asked. Now, I don’t listen to a lot of rap, much less modern day rap, so I don’t have a great grasp on what’s considered “good” nowadays, but I was sure this wasn’t it.

        At first it seemed like he was choking on his tongue, except there was some rhythm to his sputtering coughs,—puhh, puh-CHAH, puh-puhh, puh-CHAH—over which Worm began to rap.

        “I likes to get wrecked up down at the Priest Hole / Your dad’s always there  ‘cause he’s on the dole / My rhymes is tight, yeah I make it look easy / Dylan’s beats are hot like chicken jalfrezi!”

        Dylan stopped. “That don’t even make sense,” he said. “And it’s your dad who’s on the dole.”

        “Oh shit! Dirty D let the beat drop!” Worm started beatboxing while doing a somewhat passable robot, his sneakers twisting holes in the gravel, and it felt as if he were trying to impress me and horrifically failing. “Take the mic, D!”

        Dylan seemed embarrassed but let the rhymes fly anyway. “I met a tight bird and her name was Beat’rice / She was keen on my the tracksuit and the trainers I was feat’rin’ / I showed her the time, like Doctor Who / Thunk up this rhyme while I was on the loo!”

        I snuck Jacob a look while Worm shook his head. “The loo?”

        “I wasn’t ready!”

        They turned to us after a quick bout of bickering and asked us what we thought. Considering that they didn’t like each other’s rapping, we weren’t sure what to say.

        “I mean, I guess I’m more into music with, like, singing and guitars and stuff.” Jacob shrugged.

Worm dismissed with a wave of his hand. “He wouldn’t know a dope rhyme if it hit him in the bollocks,” he muttered and I rolled my eyes.

        Dylan laughed and they exchanged an arguably more dizzying series of complex, multistage handshake-fist-bump-high-fives.

        “Can we please go now?” I asked as politely as I could, despite how overwhelmingly annoyed I was.

        Luckily, or perhaps unfortunately, they didn’t notice my irritation and they smirked at me and dawdled a bit longer but pretty soon we were on our way, this time with Worm tagging along.

        Jacob took up the rear again while I was stuck between the rapping/beatboxing duo.  _ Lucky me _ , I thought.

        He followed Dylan, Worm and I along a path that wound through pastures of grazing sheep before a lung-busting ascent up a ridge; of course my inhaler had to be deployed but it only seemed to make the guys more sympathetic toward me and they argued on who got to help me and took turns actually helping me up so it wasn’t too bad after that—for me, anyways. Of course, though, neither of them gave even the slightest of shits about Jacob so I was the one helping him up the steep hills while they just stared at me and talked. At the top hovered an embankment of rolling, snaking fog so dense it was like stepping into another world. It was truly biblical; a fog I could imagine God, in one of his lesser wraths, cursing the Egyptians with. As we descended the other side it only seemed to thicken. The sun faded to a pale white bloom. Moisture clung to everything, beading on our glasses and skin, dampening our clothes and my hair into limp ringlets. The temperature dropped. We had lost Jacob for a moment and—while I panicked a little—we waited where the path flattened and he finally caught up.

        “Yank boy!” Dylan called. “This way!”

        He followed obediently. We abandoned the path to plow through a field of marshy grass. Sheep stared at us with leaky eyes, their wool soggy and tails drooping and I felt almost bad as their sorrowful gazes followed us on our way. A small house appeared out of the mist. It was all boarded up.

        “You sure this is it?” Jacob asked and I could only agree with him in his apprehension as I furrowed my brows. “It looks empty.”

        “Empty? No way, there’s loads of shit in there,” Worm replied.

        “Go on,” said Dylan. “Have a look.”

        I couldn’t help but feel like this was somehow a trick, I just wasn’t sure how and as I exchanged a look with my best friend, I could tell he felt the same way. We just kind of shrugged at each other before I went to follow him into the house when someone put their hand on my shoulder and I jumped.

        “I wouldn’t if I were you, little lady. Why not let him go on his own?” Worm said. I glared at him for a moment when I finally understood their joke and ripped his hand off my shoulder before running to stop Jacob, but I was too late.

        Just as I opened my mouth to call out to him, Jacob stepped in—and, to both of our surprises, down—the shack. I ran over and peered in to see him, shin-deep in excrement. Quite literally, a shithole.

        “Oh my god!” Jacob squealed in disgust and I didn’t blame him.

        Peals of laughter exploded from outside. I helped Jacob out before the smell could knock us unconscious and found the boys doubled over, holding their stomachs.

        “You guys are assholes!” I roared, stomping up to them and jabbing them each in the chest.

        “Woah, calm down!” Worm chuckled. “We told you it was full of shit!”

        I got as in Dylan’s face as I could. “Are you gonna show us the house or not,” I growled.

        “They’re serious,” said Worm, wiping tears from his eyes.

        “Of course we’re serious!” Jacob cried.

        Dylan’s smile faded. “I thought you were takin’ a piss, mate.”

        “Taking a  _ what _ ?” Jacob asked, confused and offended and I let out an exasperated sigh.

        “Joking.” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose to try and slow my impending headache.

        “Oh. Well we weren’t.”

        The boys exchanged an uneasy look. Dylan whispered something to Worm. Worm whispered something back. Finally Dylan turned and pointed up the path. “If you really wanna see it,” he said, “keep going past the bog and through the woods. It’s a big old place. You can’t miss it.”

        “What the hell? You’re supposed to go with us!” Jacob exclaimed.

        Worm looked away and said, “This is as far as we go.”

        “Why?”

        “It just is.” And they turned and began to trudge back the way we’d come, receding into the fog.

        We weighed our options. We could tuck tail and follow our tormentors back to town, or we could go ahead and lie to Jacob’s dad about it.

        Naturally, after about two seconds of intense deliberation, we were on our way.

✽✽✽

        A vast, lunar bog stretched away into the mist from either sides of the paths, just brown grass and tea-coloured water as far as the eye could see—or glasses, rather—featureless but for the occasional mound of piled-up stones. It ended abruptly at a forest of skeletal trees, branches spindling up like the tips of wet paint brushes, and for a while the path became so lost beneath fallen trunks and carpets of ivy and lichen that navigating it was a matter of faith. Jacob wondered aloud how an elderly person like Miss Peregrine would ever be able to negotiate such an obstacle course. She must get deliveries, he determined, though the path looked like it hadn’t seen a footprint in months, if not years.

        We scrambled over a giant trunk slick with moss, and the path took a sharp turn. The trees parted like a curtain and suddenly there it was, cloaked in fog, looming atop a weed-choked hill.  _ The house _ . We understood at once why the boys refused to come.

        Abe had described it a hundred times, but in his stories the house was always a bright, happy place—big and rambling, yes, but full of light and laughter. What stood before us now was no refuse from monsters but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger—it just about broke my heart. Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls like antibodies attacking a virus—as if nature itself had waged war against it—but the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof.

        I like to think its refusal to die was from all the years of happy memories and the “ghosts” of the inhabitants refusing to let go, but of course, like most mysteries of the universe, I’d never know in the short lifetime I had.

        Jacob was trying to convince himself that it was possible someone could still live there, run down as it was—and he wasn’t  _ entirely _ too hopeful. Such things weren’t unheard of where we came from—a falling-down wreck on the edge of town, curtains permanently drawn, that would turn out to have been home to some ancient recluse who’d been surviving on ramen noodles and toenail clippings since the dawn of time, though no one realises it until a property appraiser or overly ambitious census taker barges in to find the poor soul returning to dust in a La-Z-Boy. People get too old to care for a place, their family writes them off for one reason or another: it’s sad but it happens. Which meant, like it or not, that one of us was going to have to knock.

        I wasn’t nervous but I figured the boy next to me, whom I’d known for my whole life, should get the chance to be the brave one for once, so I stepped back to let him do his thing. 

        Jacob gathered what scrawny courage he had and, with my gently supportive pushing, led the way as we waded through waist-high weeds to the porch, all broken tile and rotting wood, to peek through a cracked window. All we could make out through the smeared glass were the outlines of furniture, so Jacob knocked a sweaty hand on the door and stood back to wait in the eerie silence. While Jacob stroked the outline of Miss Peregrine’s letter in his pocket and the seconds tick on into minutes, I was making a plan.

        Jacob let out a frustrated sigh before climbing down into the yard, myself on his heels, and he circled the house as if looking for another way in, taking measure of the place, but it seemed almost without measure, as though with every corner we turned the house sprouted new balconies and turrets and chimneys. Then we came around back and saw our opportunity: a doorless doorway, bearded with vines, gaping and black; an open mouth just waiting to swallow us whole. Just looking at it made our skin crawl—some more than others—but we hadn’t come halfway around the world only to chicken out now. I looked at Jacob, deep in thought, and I could only wonder what exactly he was thinking of—perhaps all the horrors Grandpa Portman had faced in his life—and I saw his resolve strengthen. We mounted the crumbling steps and crossed the threshold.

✽✽✽

        Standing in a tomb-dark hallway just inside the door, I stared frozenly ahead at what looked for all the world like skins hanging from hooks. Jacob grabbed my hand and I could tell he had had some horrid thought like some twisted cannibal leaping from the shadows with knife in hand—after all, Jacob wasn’t the only one with an overactive imagination—when I felt him relax a little at the simultaneous realisation that they were only coats rotted to rags and green with age. He shuddered and took a deep breath and I heard him murmur, “Keep it together” under his breath, as if to himself, and then we slowly moved forward, his heart hammering in his chest so hard I could hear it.

        Each room was a disaster more incredible than the last. Newspapers gathered in drifts. Scattered toys, evidence of children long gone, lay skinned in dust. Greening mood had turned window-adjacent walls black and furry. Fireplaces were throttled with vines that had descended from the roof and begun to spread across the floors like alien tentacles. The kitchen was a science experiment gone terribly wrong—entire shelves of jarred food had exploded from three-hundred plus seasons of freezing and thawing, splattering the wall with evil-looking stains—and fallen plaster lay so thickly over the dining room floor that for a moment it looked like it had snowed indoors. At the end of a light-starved corridor Jacob tested his weight on a rickety staircase and followed slowly, one step behind him, our boots leaving fresh tracks in layers upon layers of dust. The steps groaned as if woken from a long sleep. If anyone were upstairs, they would have definitely heard us.

        Finally we came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees had grown. We stood in the sudden breeze, Jacob audibly wondering what could have done such extensive damage as this and I allowed the wind to take the words from my lips, “ _ The bombs, Jacob, _ ” a gentle reminder, not condescending in the slightest, the chilly air washing over my face in delicate, cold waves. Jacob squeezed my hand and gave me a look that told me everything—after all, I was fluent in the language that was Jacob’s facial expressions—he had a feeling something terrible had happened here and I could tell he was having trouble associating our grandfather’s idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that he’d found refuge here with the sense of danger that pervaded it. There was more left to explore but it was obvious that suddenly it seemed like a waste of time to him; if it was impossible that anyone could still be living here, even the most misanthropic recluse. Jacob left the house feeling like he was further than ever from the truth.


	6. Chapter IV

        Once we’d hopped and tripped and felt our way out like blind men through the woods and fog and reemerged into the world of sun and light, we were surprised to find the sun sinking and the light going red. Somehow the whole day had slipped away. At the pub Jacob’s dad was waiting for us, a black-as-night beer and his open laptop on the table in front of him. We sat down and Jacob swiped his beer before he’d had a chance to even look up from typing.

        “Oh my sweet lord,” Jacob sputtered, choking down a mouthful as I laughed at him, “what is this? Fermented motor oil?”

        “Just about,” his father chuckled and then snatched it back. “It’s not like American beer. Not that you’d know what that tastes like, right?”

        “Absolutely not,” Jacob said with a wink as he slipped off his windbreaker and I tried to cover up a snort, even though it was true. Jacob’s dad liked to believe he was as popular and adventurous as he was at our age—a myth it had always seemed easiest to perpetuate.

        We underwent a brief interrogation about how we’d gotten to the house and who had taken us there, and because the easiest kind of lying is when you leave things out of a story rather than make them up, Jacob passed the inspection with flying colours. And don’t think I didn’t notice Jacob conveniently forgot to mention that Worm and Dylan had tricked him into wading through sheep shit and then bailed a half-mile from our destination. His dad seemed pleased that we’d already managed to meet a couple kids our own age; I guess he also forgot to mention the part about them hating Jacob.

        “So how was the house?”

        “Trashed.”

        He winced. “Guess it’s been a long time since your Grandpa lived there, huh?”

        “Yeah, or anyone,” Jacob said, obviously frustrated.

        His dad closed the laptop; a sure sign Jacob was about to receive his full attention. “I can see you’re disappointed.”

        “Well, me and Beatrice didn’t come thousands of miles looking for a house full of garbage.”

        “So what’re you going to do?”

        “Find people to talk to? Someone will know what happened to the kids who used to live there. I figure a few of them must still be alive, on the mainland if not around here. In a nursing home or something.”

        “Sure. That’s an idea.” He didn’t sound convinced, though. There was an odd pause, and then he said, “So do you feel like you’re starting to get a better handle on who your grandpa was? Being here?”

        Jacob thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess so. It’s just an island, you know?” I frowned a little. I didn’t realise his resolve was _that_ crushed.

        His dad nodded. “Exactly.”

        “What about you?”

        “Me?” He shrugged. “I gave up trying to understand my father a long time ago.” Now this caught our attention and I leaned into the conversation, making myself a part of it rather than just a nosy bystander.

        “That’s sad. Weren’t you interested?”

        “Sure I was. Then, after a while, I wasn’t anymore.”

        I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who could feel the conversation going in a direction I wasn’t entirely comfortable with and Jacob and I exchanged a quick, subtly distressed look before he persisted anyway, to my chagrin. “Why not?”

        “When someone won’t let you in, eventually you stop knocking. Know what I mean?”

        Jacob’s dad hardly ever talked like this. Perhaps it was the beer, or that we were so far from home, or maybe he’d decided Jacob was finally old enough to hear this stuff. Whatever the reason, neither of us wanted him to stop.

        “But he was your dad,” Jacob said, almost pleadingly. “How could you just give up?”

        “It wasn’t me who gave up!” he said a little too loudly, then looked down, embarrassed at his outburst, and swirled the beer in his glass. “It’s just that—the truth is, I think your grandpa didn’t know how to be a dad, but he felt like he had to be one anyway because none of his brothers or sisters survived the war. So he dealt with it by being gone all the time—on hunting trips, business trips, you name it. And even when he was around, it was like he wasn’t.”

        “Is this about that one Halloween?”

        “What are you talking about?”

        “You know—from the picture.”

        It was an old story, and it went like this: It was Halloween. Jacob’s dad was about four or five years old and had never gone trick-or-treating, and Grandpa Portman had promised to take him when he got off work. Jake’s grandmother had bought his dad this ridiculous pink bunny costume, and he put it on and sat by the driveway waiting for Grandpa Portman to come home from five o'clock until nightfall, but he never did. His grandma was so mad that she took a picture of his dad crying in the street just so she could show his grandfather what a huge asshole he was. Needless to say, that picture has long since been an object of legend among members of Jacob’s family, and of great embarrassment to his father.

        “It was a lot more than just one Halloween,” he grumbled. “Really, Jake, you were closer to him than I ever was. I don’t know—there was just something unspoken between you two.”

        I knew _exactly_ what that something was, but I also knew now was not a great time—not even a good time—to mention what exactly that something was. I also knew Jacob didn’t know how to respond and it seemed as if his own father was jealous of him.

        “Why are you telling me this?” Jacob asked, a hint of wariness in his voice.

        “Because you’re my son, and I don’t want you getting hurt.”

        The both of us furrowed our brows. “Hurt how?”

        His dad paused. Outside the clouds shifted, the last rays of daylight throwing our shadows against the wall. I could tell Jacob all of a sudden got a sick feeling in his stomach: I knew because I got the feeling too; the feeling like when you know your parents are about to tell you they’re splitting up, but you know it before they even open their mouths, a sense of upcoming dread.

        “I never dug too deep with your grandpa because I was afraid of what I’d find,” he said finally.

        “You mean about the war?”

        “No. Your grandpa kept those secrets because they were painful: I understood that. I mean about the traveling, him being gone all the time, what he was really doing. I think—your aunt and I both thought,” and that was when I just _knew_ what he was going to say and I did not like it one bit. “That there was another woman. Maybe more than one.”

        I winced as the words hung between us for a moment. My fists clenched my jeans under the table so tight I was sure my knuckles were white and my scalp prickles the more I thought about what he said, the more angry I grew. “That’s crazy, Dad.” Jacob said, almost in disbelief that his father could even think something like that.

        “We found a letter once,” he continued despite the cold reception of his previous words. “It was from a woman whose name we didn’t know, addressed to your       grandfather. _I love you, I miss you, when are you coming back_ , that kind of thing. Seedy, lipstick-on-the-collar type stuff. I’ll never forget it.”

        I turned to Jacob to gauge his reaction and he looked positively shell shocked.

        “We tore up the letter and flushed it down the toilet. Never found another one, either. Guess he was more careful after that.”

        I felt a hot wash of anger. He just didn’t know when to stop talking. He also didn’t know the truth and I was positively _furious_ that he was spreading his own distrust of Grandpa Portman onto Jacob.

        But he didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t even look at his father.

        “I’m sorry, Jake. This must be hard to hear. I know how much you worshipped him.” He reached out to squeeze Jacob’s shoulder but he shrugged him off and when he scraped back his chair, I took that as my cue to stand as well.

        “First off, I’m not the only one who loved Grandpa Portman, Beatrice did too and she deserves an apology too. Second, I don’t worship anyone.” Jacob said, almost growled, with his fists clenched to match mine.

        “Okay. I just. . . I didn’t want you to be surprised, that’s all.”

        Jacob grabbed his jacket and roughly shoved his arms in the sleeves as I mirrored his actions.

        “What are you doing? Dinner’s on the way.”

        “You’re wrong about him,” I said finally.

        “Yeah,” said Jacob. “And we’re going to prove it.”

        He sighed. It was a letting-go kind of sigh. The kind of sigh that only made my seething grow. “Okay. I hope you do.”

        Jacob and I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

        What Jacob’s dad said wasn’t entirely untrue; he did kind of worship his grandfather. There were things about him that Jacob—and to a degree, myself as well—needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was certainly not one of them. When we were kids, Grandpa Portman’s fantastical stories meant it was possible for us to live an equally magical life. Even after Jacob stopped believing in them, there was still something magical about my _nonno_ to him. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and beyond and have your life made unrecognisable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person we knew him to be, that was magical all in itself. So Jacob couldn’t believe—and neither could I for that matter—that he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, we weren’t sure anyone could be.

✽✽✽

        The museum’s doors were open and lights were on, but no one seemed to be inside. We’d gone there to find the curator, hoping he knew a thing or two about the island’s history and people, and could shed some light on the empty house and its inhabitants. Figuring he’d just stepped out for a minute—the crowds weren’t exactly kicking down his door—we wandered into the sanctuary to kill time checking out museum displays.

        The exhibits, such as they were, were arranged in big open-fronted cabinets that lined the walls and stood where pews had once been. For the most part they were unspeakably boring—to Jacob, at least, I loved history and anything labelled “antique” or “ancient” fascinated me—all about life in a traditional fishing village and the enduring mysteries of animal husbandry, but one exhibit stood out among the rest. It was in a place of honor at the front of the room, in a fancy case that rested atop what had been the altar. It lived behind a rope that Jacob stepped over and a little warning sign he didn’t bother to read, and its case had polished wooden sides and a Plexiglas top so that you could only see into it from above.

        When Jacob looked inside, he audibly gasped and I quickly scrambled under the rope—being to short to step over it without the chance of bringing it and/or myself down—to stand beside him because he had suddenly and unexpectedly come face-to-face with a blackened corpse. Its shrunken body bore an uncanny resemblance to the creatures that had haunted Jacob’s dreams, as did the colour of its flesh, which was like something that had been spit-roasted over a flame. But when the body failed to come alive and scar his mind forever by breaking the glass and going straight for his jugular, Jacob’s initial panic subsided. It was just a museum display, after all, albeit an excessively morbid one.

        “I see you’ve met the old man,” called a voice from behind us, and we jumped before turning to see the curator striding in our direction. “You both handled it pretty well. I’ve seen grown men faint dead away!” He grinned and reached out to shake our hands. “Martin Pagett. Don’t believe I caught your names the other day.”

        “Beatrice Vista,” I smiled.

        “Jacob Portman,” he said. “Who’s this? Wales’ most famous murder victim?”

        “Ha! Well, he might be that, too, though I never thought of him that way. He’s our island’s senior-most resident, better known in archaeological circles as Cairnholm Man—though to us, he’s just the Old Man. More than twenty-seven-hundred years old, to be exact, though he was only sixteen when he died. So he’s a rather young old man, really.”

        “Twenty-seven- _hundred_?” Jacob said, glancing at the boy’s face with wide eyes, his delicate features perfectly preserved. “But he looks so. . .”

        “Young?” I asked.

        “That’s what happens when you spend your golden years in a place where oxygen and bacteria can’t exist, like the underside of our bog. It’s a regular fountain of youth down there—provided you’re already dead, that is.”

        “Is that where you found him? The bog?” asked Jacob, obviously interested in the topic.

        Martin laughed. “Not me! Turf cutters did, digging for peat by the big stone cairn out there, back in the seventies.”

        “Cairn?”

        “It’s basically a pile of stones built as a memorial or landmark,” I explained.

        “Impressive,” Martin commented with a smile. “Anywho, the Old Man looked so fresh they thought there might be a killer loose on Cairnholm till the cops had a look at the Stone Age bow in his hand and the noose of human hair round his neck. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

        Jacob shuddered. “Sounds like a human sacrifice or something.”

        “Exactly. He was done in by a combination of strangulation, drowning, disembowelment, and a blow to the head. Seems rather like overkill, don’t you think?”

        “I guess so.”

        Martin roars with laughter and I chuckled along. “He guesses so!”

        “Okay, yeah, it does.”

        “Sure it does. But the really fascinating thing, to us modern folk, anyway, is that in all likelihood the boy went to his death willingly, eagerly, even. His people believed that bogs—and our bog in particular—were entrances to the world of the gods, and so the perfect place to offer up their most precious gifts: themselves.

        “That’s insane.”

        “I suppose. Though I imagine we’re killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that’ll seem insane to people in the future. And as doors to the next world go, a bog ain’t a bad choice. It’s not quite water, it’s not quite land—it’s an in-between place.” He bent over the case, studying the figure inside. “Ain’t he beautiful?”

        We looked at the body again, throttled and flayed and drowned and somehow made immortal in the process.

        “I don’t think so,” Jacob said but I had to disagree. I thought he looked almost like a piece of art, a sculpture of an eternally sleeping babe made of ebony, perhaps.

        Martin straightened, then began to speak in a grandiose tone. “Come, you, and gaze upon the tar man! Blackly he reposes, tender face the colour of soot, withered limbs like veins of coal, feet, lumps of driftwood hung with shriveled grapes!” He threw his arms out like a hammy stage actor and began to strut about the case. “Come, you, and bear witness to the cruel art of his wounds! Purled and meandering lines drawn by knives; brain and bones exposed by stones; the rope still digging at his throat. First fruit slashed and dumped—seeker of heaven—old man arrested in youth—I almost love you!”

        He took a theatrical bow as Jacob and I applauded. “Wow,” Jacob said, “did you write that?”

        “Guilty!” he sang with a sheepish smile. “I twiddle about with lines of verse now and then, but it’s only a hobby. In any case, thank you for indulging me.”

        We wondered what this odd, well-spoken man was doing in Cairnholm, with his pleated slacks and half-baked poems, looking more like a bank manager than someone who lived on a windswept island with one phone and no paved roads.

        “Now, I’d be happy to show you the rest of my collection,” he said, escorting us toward the door, “but I’m afraid it’s shutting-up time. If you’d like to come back tomorrow, however‒”

        “Actually, we were hoping you might know something,” I said, stopping him before he could shoo us out. “It’s about the house we mentioned? We went to see it.”

        “Well!” He exclaimed, “I thought I’d scared you off it! How’s our haunted mansion faring these days? Still standing?”

        Jacob assured him that it was, then got right to the point. “The people that lived there—do you have any idea what happened to them?”

        “They’re dead,” he replied in a curt, right-to-the-point manner. “Happened a long time ago.”

        Jacob was surprised but he persisted, “I’m looking for anyone else who might have lived there, too, not just the headmistress.”

        “All dead,” he repeated, “no one’s lived there since the war.”

        That took us both a moment to process. “What war?” I asked.

        “When we say “the war” around here, kids, there’s only one that we mean—the second. It was a German air raid that got ‘em, if I’m not mistaken.”

        “No, that can’t be right.” Jacob said and I placed my hand in the crook of his arm—for comfort as well as to steady him—as the blood began to drain from his face.

        Martin nodded. “In those days, there was an anti-aircraft gun battery at the far tip of the island, past the wood where the house is. It made Cairnholm a legitimate military target. Not that legitimate mattered much to the Germans one way or another, mind you. Anyway, one of the bombs went off track, and, well. . .” He shook his head. “Nasty luck.”

        “That can’t be right,” Jacob said again, though, despite his greening complexion and the clammy hand that suddenly grabbed mine in a vice-like grip, I could tell his mind was racing.

        “Why don’t you sit down and let me fix you some tea?” Martin said, beginning to pull away the rope from the display. “You look a bit off the mark,” which I assumed was just local-speak for ‘You look like you’re about to vomit all over my carpet.’

        “Just feeling a little light-headed. . .” Jacob mumbled as the curator led us to his office then went off to go make us some tea and I guided Jacob to take a seat in a cushy looking arm chair where I sat on the arm with his hand in my lap. He was obviously trying to collect his thoughts and understand how exactly Miss Peregrine sent that letter only 15 years ago if the house was bombed and all the residents died in World War II.

        Martin returned handing each of us a mug. “There’s a nip of Penderyn in it,” he said, nodding towards Jacob with a wink. “Secret recipe, you know. Should get you sorted in no time.”

        We thanked him and took a sip, Jacob obviously realising a second too late that the secret ingredient was a high-test whiskey.

        “It does have a certain kick,” Jacob wheezed, his face going red.

        Martin frowned. “Reckon I ought to fetch your father.”

        “No, no. I’ll be fine,” Jacob said. “But if there’s anything else you can tell us about the attack, we’d be grateful.”

        The curator settled into a chair opposite us. “About that, I’m curious. You say your grandfather lived here. He never mentioned it?”

        “We’re curious about that, too,” I said honestly as the bombing was news to me, too. “But why don’t we try to answer questions that don’t need a seance, yeah?”

        “I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know. But if you’re keen, I can introduce you to someone who does—my Uncle Oggie. He’s eighty-three, lived here his whole life. Still sharp as a tack.” Martin glanced at his watch. “If we catch him before _Father Ted_ comes on the telly, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to tell you anything you like.”

✽✽✽

        Ten minutes later, Martin, Jacob and I were wedged deep in an overstuffed sofa—myself practically in Jacob’s lap, better than Martin’s, though—in Oggie’s living room, which was piled high with books and boxes of worn-out shoes and enough lamps to light up Carlsbad Caverns, all but one of them unplugged. Living on a remote island, Jacob and I were starting to realise, turned people into packrats. Oggie sat facing us in a threadbare blazer and pyjama bottoms, as if he’d been expecting company—just not pants-worthy company—and rocked endlessly in a plastic-covered easy chair as he talked. He seemed happy just to have an audience—which made me happy in return as making people happy is basically my life’s work—and after he’d gone on at length about the weather and Welsh politics and the sorry state of today’s youth, Martin was finally able to steer him around to the attack and the children from the home.

        “Sure, I remember them,” he said. “Odd collection of people. We’d see them in town now and again—the children, sometimes their minder-woman, too—buying milk and medicine and what-have-you. You’d say ‘good morning’ and they’d look the other way. Kept to themselves, they did, off in that big house. Lot of talk about what might’ve been going on over there, though, no one knew for sure.”

        “What kind of talk?” I asked, slightly narrowing my eyes at the old man, though I doubt he could see.

        “Lot of rot. Like I said, no one knew. All I can say is they weren’t your regular sort of orphan children—not like them Barnardo Home kids they got in other places, who you’ll see come into town for parades and things and always have time for a chat. This lot was different. Some of ‘em couldn’t even speak the King’s English. Or any English, for that matter.”

        “Because they weren’t really orphans,” Jacob said. “They were refugees from other countries like Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia. . .”

        “Is that what they were now?” Oggie said, cocking one eyebrow at him. “Funny, I hadn’t heard that.” He seemed almost offended, like Jacob had insulted him by pretending to know more about his island than he did. His chair-rocking got faster, more aggressive. If this was the kind of reception my _nonno_ and the other kids got on Cairnholm, we thought, no wonder they kept to themselves.

        Martin cleared his throat. “So, Uncle, the bombing?”

        “Oh, keep your hair on. Yes, yes, the goddamned Jerries. Who could forget them?” He launches into a long-winded description of what life on the island was like under threat of German air-raids: the blaring sirens; the panicked scrambles for shelter; the volunteer air-raid warden who ran from house to house at night making sure shades had been drawn and streetlights were put out to rob enemy pilots of easy targets. They prepared as best they could but never really thought they’d get hit, given all the ports and the factories on the mainland, all much more important targets than Cairnholm’s little gun emplacement. But one night, the bombs began to fall.

        “The noise was dreadful,” Oggie said. “It was like giants stamping across the island, and it seemed to go on for ages. They gave us a hell of a pounding, though no one in town was killed, thank heaven. Can’t say the same for our gunner boys—though they gave as good as they got—nor the poor souls at the orphan home. One bomb was all it took. Gave up their lives for Britain, they did. So wherever they was from, God bless ‘em for that.”

        “Do you remember when it happened?” I asked. “Early in the war or late?”

        “I can tell you the exact day,” he said. “It was the third of September, 1940.”

        I saw the colour drain from Jacob’s face and felt the breath leave his lungs. I could only imagine what he was thinking of—most likely he was remembering his grandfather’s ashen face, his lips just barely moving, uttering those very words: _September third, 1940_. That’s what I was thinking, at least.

        “Are you–you sure about that?” Jacob asked with a nervous swallow. “That it was _that_ day?”

        “I never got to fight,” Oggie said. “Too young by a year. That night was my whole war. So yes, I’m sure.”

        I discreetly-as-possible grabbed Jacob’s hand and as soon as I had him in my grip, I could feel the clamminess of his skin.

        “And there weren’t any survivors at all?” Martin asked.

        The old man thought for a moment, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “I reckon there were. Just one. A young man, not much older than this boy here.” His rocking stopped as he remembered it. “Walked into town the morning after with not a scratch upon him. Hardly seemed perturbed at all, considering he’d just seen all his mates go to their reward. It was the queerest thing.”

        “He was probably in shock,” Martin said.

        “I shouldn’t wonder,” replied Oggie. “He spoke only once, to ask my father when the next boat was leaving for the mainland. Said he wanted to take up arms directly and kill the damned monsters who murdered his people.”

        Oggie’s story was nearly as far-fetched as the ones Grandpa Portman used to tell, and yet we held no reason to doubt him.

        “We knew him, that boy,” I said, gesturing to Jacob. “He was his grandfather.”

        They looked at us—Jacob more so than myself—astonished. “Well,” Oggie said, in an almost reverent whisper. “I’ll be blessed.”

        Jacob excused himself and I excused myself along with him and thanked Oggie and Martin for their time for the both of us. Martin, remarking that we seemed out of sorts—again, Jacob more so than myself—offered to walk us back to the pub, but I declined. I knew Jacob needed to be “alone” with his thoughts. “Come and see me soon, then,” he said, and I promised we would.

        We took the long way back, feet crunching on gravel being the only noise shared between us, past the swaying lights of the harbour, the air heavy with brine and with chimney smoke from a hundred hearth fires. Jacob walked to the end of a dock and just stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the moon rise over the water, perhaps thinking of his grandfather the morning of September fourth, waiting for the next ship to get him off the island to fight the monsters who killed his people. If only Jacob knew how true that was.

        In the distance, we heard the generators sputter and spin down, and all the lights along the harbour and in house windows behind us surged for a moment before going dark; 10 o’clock. I could only imagine how such a thing might look from an airplane’s height—the whole island suddenly winking out, as if it had never been there at all. A supernova in miniature.

✽✽✽

        We walked back by moonlight, feeling small. We found Jacob’s dad in the pub at the same table where we’d left him, two half-picked plates of beef and gravy congealing into a jello-y grease before him. “Look who’s back,” he said as we sat down. “I saved your dinners for you.”

        “I’m not hungry,” Jacob said, I nodded in agreement, and told him what we’d learned about Grandpa Portman.

        He seemed more angry than surprised. “I can’t believe he never brought this up,” he said. “Not one time.” We could understand his anger: it was one thing for a grandparent to withhold something like that from a grandchild, quite another for a father to keep it from his son—and for so long.

        I sensed the growing tension in the air and tried to steer the conversation in a more positive direction. “It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? Everything he went through.”

        Jacob’s father nodded. “I don’t think we’ll ever know the full extent of it.”

        “Grandpa Portman really knew how to keep a secret, didn’t he,” Jacob chuckled. Boy howdy, did he.

        His dad snorted in response. “Are you kidding? The man was an emotional Fort Knox.”

        “I wonder if it doesn’t explain something though; why he acted so distant when you were little,” Jacob mused to which his dad gave a sharp look and we knew he needed to make his point quickly or risk overstepping. “He’d already lost his family twice before. Once in Poland and then again here—his adopted family—so when you and Aunt Susie came along. . .”

        “Once bombed, twice shy?”

        “I’m serious. Don’t you think this could mean he wasn’t cheating on Grandma after all?”

        “I don’t know, Jake. I guess I don’t believe things are ever that simple.” He let out a sigh, breath fogging the inside of his beer glass. “I think I know what all this explains, though. Why you and Grandpa were so close.”

        “Okay. . .”

        “It took him fifty years to get over his fear of having a family. You and Beatrice came along at just the right time.”

        Jacob didn’t know how to respond. How do you say _I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough_ to your own dad? He couldn’t do we just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.

✽✽✽

        Jacob tossed and turned most of the night. He couldn’t stop thinking about the letters—the one his dad and aunt found as kids, from this “other woman,” and the one we’d found only a few months ago, from Miss Peregrine. The thought that kept him awake was _what if they were the same woman?_

        So, of course, I sat up with him and let him talk it out.

        “The postmark on Miss Peregrine’s letter was fifteen years old, but by all accounts she’d been blown into the stratosphere back in 1940.” To his mind, that left only two possible explanations: either his grandfather had been corresponding with a dead person—admittedly unlikely—or the person who wrote the letter was not, in fact, Miss Peregrine, but someone who was using her identity to disguise their own.

        “Why would you disguise your identity in a letter?” I asked, amusing Jacob’s thoughts.

        “Because you have something to hide,” Jacob said solemnly. “Because you’re the other woman.

        What if the only thing we discover on this trip is that our grandfather was an adulterous liar? In his last breaths, was he trying to tell us about the death of his adopted family—or admit to some–some tawdry decades-long affair? Maybe it was both, and the truth was that by the time he was a young man he’d had his family torn apart so many times he no longer knew how to have one, or how to be faithful to one.”

        “How very eloquent of you, Jacob,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

        “ _Bea_ ,” he whined, obviously tired.

        It was all just guesswork, though. He didn’t know, and there was no one to ask who would willingly answer. He said in less than twenty-four hours, the trip had become pointless.

        I just sighed wistfully and hugged him and we fell into an uneasy sleep with his face hidden in my chest and his arms around my waist in the most platonic way possible.

✽✽✽

        At dawn, Jacob and I awoke to the sound of something in our room. I woke up when the rustling first began and I quietly grabbed my knife, now noticing that Jacob had awoken as well, before we sat bolt upright in bed, myself facing the possible intruder in front of Jacob, weapon extended. We were both surprised when we looked who had entered our room. A large bird was perched on our dresser, staring us down. It had a sleek head feathered in grey and talons that clacked on the wood as it sidled back and forth along the edge, as  if to get a better look at us. We stared back rigidly, wondering if this could be a dream.

        I started to slide off the bed—as small, unthreatening and as quiet as I could be—trying not to scare off the bird. As soon as I began moving, its dark, beady eyes were focused on me. As I stared back, creeping ever so slightly forward, inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre, I noticed how human it’s eyes looked, like it was actually looking, not just at me, but _into_ my eyes. Then, Jacob called out for his dad and at the sound of his voice, the bird launched itself off the dresser. We both ducked and when we peaked again, it was gone, flown out the open window.

        I clucked my tongue at him as I slid my knife into my pyjama pants’ pocket and all he could do was shrug at me before his dad stumbled in, bleary-eyed and scruffy. “What’s going on?”

        Once we showed him the talon marks on the dresser and a feather that had been left behind on the floor, his dreariness seemed to seep out of him. “God, that’s weird,” he mumbled to himself, turning the feather over in his hands. “Peregrines almost never come this close to humans.”

        I turned to Jacob as the colour drained from his face. “Did you say _peregrines_?” Jacob asked.

        His dad held up the plumage. “A peregrine falcon,” he said. “They’re amazing creatures—the fastest birds on Earth. They’re like shape-shifters, the way they streamline their bodies in the air.”

        I was giddy but couldn’t show it, especially since it was obvious to me just by looking at my best friend that he thought it was merely a coincidence. A very odd, specific coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.

        Over breakfast, however, I could tell Jacob was lost in thought and I could only cross my fingers and hope that he was thinking about what I hoped he was.

        So as we got back to our room to plan the day ahead of us, he told me he’d given up too easily. That, even if there was no one alive he could talk to, there was still the house, the majority still largely unexplored. That perhaps there was some record of his grandfather—a photo album, maybe, or a diary or letters—that may have burned up or rotted away decades ago. But if he left the island without making sure, he knew he’d regret it.

        And that is how someone who is unusually susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies, Things That Go Bump in the Night and Seeing Things That Aren’t Really There and his best friend and guardian—almost equally as susceptible—talked themselves into one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or so children met their (supposedly) untimely end.


End file.
